NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE INTERPRETATION PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS AND PLAYS THE PRINCIPLE OF RACES. Quidquid est optimum, aute non fuerat. QUIXTILIAX. EDINBURGH: ADAM AND CHAELES BLACK. 185 9. [The right of translation is i {served.] VRIJSTEf. bV K. .'-ID a. '', j.'U " I EUH. Bight of translation in all languages, and abroad, reserved. NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. PREFACE Two years ago, at the request of the editors of the Youth's Companion, I wrote for that periodical a series of four familiar articles on the boyhood of Shakespeare. It was understood at the time that I might afterwards ex- pand them into a book, and this plan is carried out in the present volume. The papers have been carefully revised and enlarged to thrice their original compass, and a new fifth chapter has been added. The sources from which I have drawn my material are often mentioned in the text and the notes. I have been particularly indebted to Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, Knight's Biography of Shakspere, Furnivall's Introduction to the " Leopold " edition of Shakespeare, his Babees Book, and his edition of Harri- son's Descriptioii of England, Sidney Lee's Stratford-on- Avon, Strutt's Sports and Pastimes, Brand's Popular An- tiquities, and Dyer's Folk-Lore of Shakespeare. I hope that the book may serve to' give the young folk some glimpses of rural life in England when Shakespeare was a boy, and also to help them — and possibly their elders — to a better understanding of many allusions m his works. W. J. R. Cambridge, fune 10, 1896. CONTENTS PAGE PART I.— HIS NATIVE TOWN AND NEIGHBOR- HOOD i Warwickshire 3 Warwick Castle and Saint Mary's Church . . 4 Warwick in History 8 Guy of Warwick 9 Kenilworth Castle 12 Coventry 14 Charlecote Hall .19 Stratford-on-Avon 24 The Early History of Stratford 27 The Stratford Guild 34 The Stratford Corporation 39 The Topography of Stratford 43 PART II.— HIS HOME LIFE 47 The Dwelling-houses of the Time . . ... 49 The Household Furniture 52 XFood and Drink 57 The Training of Children 60 ^Indoor Amusements 67 Popular Books 71 Story-telling 73 Christenings So Superstitions connected with Birth and Baptism. 84 Charms and Amulets S7 1 viii ILL US TRA TIONS THE SCHOOL-ROOM AS IT WAS gj DESK SAfD TO BE SHAKESPEARE'S 102' WALK ON THE BANKS OF THE AVON Facing p. \ hide-and-seek ' " 122 "morris" board 130 FISHING IN THE AVON Facing p. I32 THE BEAR GARDEN, LONDON 1 33 GARDEN AT NEW PLACE Facing/. I46 ELIZABETH HAWKING . 155 BOY WITH HAWK AND HOUNDS -1 59 ITINERANT PLAYERS IN A COUNTRY HALL . . . Facing p. 160 WILLIAM KEMP DANCING THE MORRIS I&3 THE BOUNDARY ELM 167 MORRIS-DANCE Facing p. 178 CLOPTON HOUSE ON CHRISTMAS EVE " I9O THE FAIR " 2CM INTERIOR OF GRAMMAR SCHOOL, BEFORE THE RESTORA- TION 228 CLOPTON MONUMENTS Facing p 23S THE BAR-GATE, SOUTHAMPTON 242 AUTOGRAPH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH 245 ARMS OF JOHN SHAKESPEARE . 25 1 CONTENTS, INTRODUCTION. PAGE SURVEY OF THE COMMENTATORS of Shakespeare— The true nature of his Genius and Drama determined — The Principal Characters representative of Races ... 1 CHAPTER I. I AGO, as Type of the Romano-Italic Race 23 CHAPTER II. HAMLET, as Type of the Teutonic Race CHAPTER III. MACBETH, as Type of the Celtic Race . 116 CHAPTER IV. SECONDARY CHARACTERS, respectively confirmatory — Ophelia, the Queen, Polonius, the King, etc. — Ladies M ac- beth and Macduff, Banquo, Macduff, Lennox, etc. — Othello, Desdemona, etc. 185 CONTENTS. CHAPTEE V. SHYLOCK, as Type of the Hebrew Kace .... 229 CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION, respecting the Pace of Shakespeare himself . 250 SUPPLEMENTARY DISSERTATION On the Witches of Macbeth, and the Supernatural Machinery in general of Shakespeare ; shewing a similar historical con- formity to Race in the principal descriptions, which are Witches, Ghosts, and Fairies 315 CORRIGENDA. 2, Hi 33, 100, 135, 190, 199, 202, 215, 235, 245, 323, 339, line 9, for " space " read place. 13, for "number" read expositors. 15, for " medicine " read anatomy. 15 (of note), for " Hector" read Paris. 7, for " scrutinity" read scrutiny. 7, for " in example " read an example 2 (of note), for "by" read to. 16, for "those" read that. 22, for "a fortitude" read audacity. 8 (of note), for " arms " read valour. 23, for 16, for 22, for 3 (of note), - I " read and. mena " read name. git" read gist. for " of course every change, when once effected, in the same sanction,'' read every change, when once effected, has of course the same sanction. Jut.y 2, 1859- NEW EXEGESIS OE SHAKESPEAEE. INTRODUCTORY. 1. If the philosophy of Shakespeare's drama be still imper- fectly conceived, it can be from no lack of number or experiment ;in the expounders. Through the crowd and the contention of these sedulous instructors, in the various shapes of lecture, annotation, discpiisition, the theme itself is come at last to be confused into a myth, and Shakespeare shuffled off the stage of his own genius and even writings. This anti-climax of patriotic admiration and acuteness has been reached in a recent essay by an American authoress, and so a sex as well as nation who, averse to half measures, love in most things, in the home apothegm, to " go the whole hog." But both the nation and the sex are also known not to be nice, if British [criticism longer furnished something fresh for repetition. So Ithat the desperate resort to a Shakespearian scepticism seems [to indicate, like the Homeric, the exhaustion of the commen- "tators : and a lady was, for various reasons, the natural flag of such distress. Yet it is evident that Shakespeare in reality is not exhausted. Even the ablest of his critics are but rarely B 2 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. agreed, with one another or themselves, on either his excel- lences or defects. There is inevitably an agreement that he neglects the classic unities ; hut there is difference as to the value to be set on the observance. Pope, though more through classic prejudice or his own formal and compact genius, than comprehension of the merits, blames the negligence of Shakespeare. Johnson, on the contrary, excuses or defends it, and on grounds no less unsound than Pope's objections were inapplicable. Assuming that the unities, at least of space and time, are nothing more than mere artistic expedients of J illusion, he replies that there is really no illusion from first to last. The spectators continue fully conscious of the theatre while assenting to the opening scene which yet supposes them elsewhere ; there can therefore, concludes Johnson, after this be nothing dissonant in the recurrence of the like solu- tions of continuity throughout the piece. He was deluded by an understanding which though masculine was material, and had no notion of an ideal world beyond the negative stage of ghosts. Conceding him the fact, which, however,! should be cpialified, the consciousness he speaks of being but rapidly intermittent, still the principle, the argument, would J be invalid and absurd. The theatre and time are of the I province of the senses, while the action of the play can bej pursued but by the intellect. The illusion, then, commences, not on the floor, but on the stage ; and takes place not in] the senses, but alone in the imagination. So far, therefore, j from identity or analogy of principle, as Johnson's reasoning assumed, there is a sort of contrariety. Imagination is a species of reaction against the senses, an endeavour to reduce to unity their dispersive multiplicity. Unity is thus its. INTRODUCTORY. 6 object, and by consequence the soul of art. In fact, the arts are the language of action applied to truth, in awaiting the articulate enunciation of science : but truth Avill be admitted to be one and continuous. ISTor in exacting these conditions in the drama or other art, is there, moreover, an implication of " illusion" in the proper sense. This word is taken, like Johnson's argument, from fie point of view of the senses. But with the intellect in the stage of imagination and even of reason, it is the objects of the senses that, on the contrary, are illusory : in the arts and even the sciences it is the ideal that is real, the abstract that is true, the harmonious that is natural. August Schlegel, too, although a critic of more taste, repeats the view of Johnson, but has the grace to avoid his principles. "With him a sufficient account of the exclusion of the unities appears to be supplied by the term " romantic drama." For, how this species of drama can dispense with them legitimately, or what it is itself, he does not very clearly say. His main authority and explanation is its Teutonic- extraction. The offspring is, however, not so flattering as he imagines ; as will, it is expected, be unfolded in the sequel. In fine, a critic of our own, the most in vogue, perhaps of the day, and in reality a writer of ability and learning, denounces these unities as " the most absurd laws by which genius was ever held in servitude." 1 This is cer- tainly scarce modest in the teeth of Aristotle, backed more- over by the practice of most dramatists before and after him. The critic, therefore, wdl support himself by argument, no doubt 1 iSTot at all ; he only thinks to fortify hyperbole by 1 Macaulay, on Moore's Life of Byron. 4 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. ejnphase. " ISTo human being," lie proceeds, " has ever been able to find anything that could, even by courtesy, be called argument for these unities, except that they have been deduced from the general practice of the Greeks" ! But even supposing it might be asked how they got into this general practice, and how the practice of the Greeks became in this, as so many other things, a general rule of the learned world, if it was palpably absurd. The rhetorician, appre- hending that this conflict with a " precedent" would be more sensible than if he trampled on the whole decalogue of principles, condescends to a show of argument, but in the usual trenchant tone. He takes the bull by the horns, and disparages the Greek drama, as " incomparably inferior (of course) to the English, in the exhibition of human character and human life." But this, again, might well be, and yet the unities be obligatory : the canoe of the Bed Indian is inferior to a merchantman, but they are both not the less constructed on the same fundamental laws. Perceiving this, apparently, he specifies in this wise : "Every scholar knows that the dramatic part of the Athenian tragedies was at first subordinate to the lyrical part. It would, therefore, have been little less than a miracle if the laws of the Athenian stage had been found to suit plays in which there was no chorus." Now it should be known to scholars, even in the Oxford sense, that what may have been true " at first," is not conclusive throughout ; that the unities could never be, at first or at last, applied at all to lyrical composition, in any form ; that, in fine, the drama proper dropped its lyrical placentum but in proportion as conformed to those laws of its organism. But Macaulay has no doubt the same apology for INTRODUCTORY. 5 vilifying, as Shakespeare would himself have for discarding, the unities : the one was perhaps acting no less than the other. At all events, the " little less than miracle" he speaks of, was wrought, it has heen seen, quite incidentally above. Long before, the universal obligation of the unities was hinted by the earliest, yet the best, of English critics : the accom- plished Philip Sidney remarks of a play, that it is " faultie both in place and time, the two necessarie companions of all isorporall actions." This is really an extension of Aristotle's empiric statement ; for the unities apply to plays by the same necessity as to machines. As of Shakespeare's defects in even the least questioned instance, so is the least contested of his excellences still un- settled. This, it is familiar, is the portraiture of character. Yet listen to M. Guizot, who speaks, however, of the comedies : — " Look for neither verisimilitude, nor coherence, nor profound knowledge of man or of society; the poet scarce troubles himself about these things, and invites you to do likewise. To excite interest by the development of situations, to divert by the variety of incidents, to charm by the poetic affluence of the detads, such is his aspiration ; such the pleasures which he offers you. Even in these, there is no connection, no con- catenation ; vices, virtues, purposes, cdl change from moment to moment." 1 But Johnson says that comedy was the " instinct" of Shakespeare's genius, and tragedy an effort of skill. M. Guizot, it is true, reverses the opinion, thinks the drollery a mere condescension to public taste, and the tragedy to be the instinct, agreeing, however, that its forte is character. Well, be it so, but ivhat character 1 The 1 Shakespeare et son Temps. b NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. " individual," says Pope. No, cries Johnson, it is the "species." And Schlegel, with Germanic vagueness, floats between these extreme contraries. Extreme and contrary, for they are "both alike remote from the truth, and as far remote as possible. They may easily be shown to be effectually absurd. There could be no excellence in discerning, and no interest in witnessing, what is common to all men, or what is proper to each ; for these are what He trivially familiar on the sur- face. The brute animals themselves can distinguish their own species, and in the species can recognise the individuals severally. In the human, the first impression, universally, spontaneously, on beholding a fellow-being is, that he is a man, and such a man ; and he who should pretend, by exhibition or by argument, to add to the assurance of or interest in either character, would run the risk of seeming less a genius than a bore. In fact, the specialty of the bore is to be ever characterising by the platitudes of common- place or the nick-nackeries of circumstance. This nullity of the common and the individual " characters," arises from the fact that they impart no information, either objectively by impression or reflexively by interest — in Aristotle's formida, excite no terror and no pity ; and their concurrence in the impotence is but a common case of the tendency of all extremes to meet in imbecility. Both the principles may be elucidated by the axiom of logic which makes the individual and the genus indefinable. For what definition is in science, characterization is in art. Shakespeare then, in praise or censure, has, by even his serious critics, been examined on no principles of the dramatic art. They have, for want of definition, but been trying to INTRODUCTORY. 7 describe him, by a medley of attributions affected equally to sundry others. He is eloquent, wise, witty, philosophical, in short, all tilings, save precisely the distinctions of his proper power and province. This licentiousness of criticism is a cause of its own barrenness ; for that of which one may say most things, is that of which he can show least. It is the case of the enamoured Quixote who, to analyse his idol, is represented by the Spanish Shakespeare as falling back upon the alphabet. As for the minores gentium of the Shakespearian com- mentators, the less that is said of them, the better for all parties. They would be best characterised, perhaps, as abecederian. Old spellings, old readings, old editions, and their forms ; contemporary pamphlets, anecdotes, allu- sions ; personal transactions, account-books, receipts ; auto- graphs, tavern-bills, localities, dates, days ; in fine, an exact list (controlled like all the rest by controversy) of the number of canes and snuff-boxes made from the famous tree of the poet — such have been the burthen of a hundred native essays, and the basis of a score of new editions of his works. 1 Not one, perhaps, of the multitude, either essayist or editor, has decently attempted an analysis of those works or seemed to think at all of compassing the " man-mountain" as a whole. The gravest theoretic tentatives were the mere pre- 1 This description of research has been pushed to the perfection of discovering that, at the burial of one of Shakespeare's sisters, the cost of " bell-ringing" amounted to the sum of 8 pence, which was something above the minimum of popular expenditure. Whence it has been deduced, with a logic no less national, that the family of the poet must have been "well to do" in the world, and therefore his productions the more evi- dently works of genius. 8 NEW EXEGESIS OP SHAKESPEAKE. faces alluded to. The few remarks of Pope are intelligent enough ; but they are merely technical or vaguely descriptive. Warburton has added but his catches and combativeness. Johnson's lengthier preface is able and honest. But it is the dissertation of a man of wit, not views ; of a critic, not an artist ; of a moralist, not a philosopher ; it is not an exposi- tion of systematic doctrines that goes to give a clearer com- prehension of Shakespeare, but a pyrotechnic blaze of points, proprieties, pros and cons, along the trellis of a stately style, that leaves one after in the same obscurity. The writer has, however, well discerned in principle the cause of the micro- scopic groping of the critics. "Parts" says he, "are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary to the comprehension of any great work in its full design, and in its true proportions ; a close approach shows the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is not discovered." l And yet this whole, as applied to Shakespeare in his genius or his works, he was himself as far from compassing as most of the other English critics. It should, however, be remembered that the feat is not easy. Goethe, speaking too of Shakespeare, in Wilhelm Meister, observes truly : " Few Germans, and perhaps few persons of any modern nation, are capable of appreciating an aesthetic whole." 2. But Shakespeare must have had a unity at least in his own genius, and have stamped it on his writings by a necessity no less organic. To know this unity was the first requisite to comprehend and to criticise him. To make it 1 Preface to Shakespeare. INTRODUCTORY. 9 known would be an effort too ambitious for a preface, and can only be expected as a result of the volume. It seems, bow- ever, indispensable to give some previous indications, and not impossible to bring them within suitable dimensions. All genius of the supreme order, more especially in the arts, is the expression (not the organ) of an advance in social progress. It does not operate the result, but exhibit it to the operator. This impelling force at bottom is the general experience, which accumulates through ages, much in the manner of a coral edifice. The work, while deep beneath the ocean of the primeval ignorance, remains unnoted in the multiform eccentricities called popular usages. As it approxi- mates the surface, coming mystically in various conflict with the voyagers of this moral sea, the generalizes of the day, the myriad prominences, thus invested at once with dubious- ness and danger, are by them fancied into the character and the consistence named mythology. When, ages later, the reef emerges a spacious island into light and unity, 1 the divine mystery falls away, the lurking deities are forgotten, the poet supplants the theologian, to humanise the mystic scene. The typic creatures — here all moral, like the experi- ence whence they emanated — pass before him, as another Adam, to receive rank and denomination. They must already have existed in romances or storied records attached to some historic personage of the community thus symbolised. The drama, as the name expresses, puts the story into action, in 1 It is of course sufficient for the purpose of the text that such has heen and still is the common opinion, although it be more probable that the coraline formation composes but a mere coating of a volcanic moun- tain. 10 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. conditions that evolve the latent features of the character I that is, that analyse the long subterranean process of the public understanding in the creation of the myth, and thus delight it with the spectacle of its own properties and powers ; in fine, that open its unconscious possessions into conscious- ness, or in the words of Shakespeare, hold the mirror up to nature. The genius of the innovating poet and philosopher is the capacity of seizing these leading germs of the general mind, and of unfolding them, the poet to flower, and the philosopher to fruit. This genius, therefore, has the unity of that which it embraces, the unity of impulsion, of growth, of inspiration ; though lower grades have but the unity of object or of art. From such a chaotic or coraline elaboration of the national mind, excited chiefly by the wars of Troy, which threw together so many peoples, of which the deeds and the dis- tinctions took mythic body in the long interval — from this, accordingly, arose at last the great Eschylus and the Greek drama. So, from the cycle of the middle ages — a similar chaos, on a vaster scale, of wars, races, and the romances that personified them — issued Shakespeare. But though the poets be thus analogous in origin and excellence, their pro- vinces were as divergent as the epochs and the scenes. The Greek was limited to the experience of an angle of Europe i the British poet enjoyed the whole, with twenty centuries more of history. The former, too, as the initiator, must have wrought on the exterior — on the actions, costumes, customs, of the tribes of his traditions. The modern innovator, by this subsequence, must pass in order to the interior — must seek the ideas and the characters that are the causes of such externals, and, as a consequence, depict, not families or tribes, INTRODUCTORY. 11 but nations or rather races. For the causes are the most general and latent element in all objects, and it is latency and generality combined that produce interest. This, in fact, is the golden mean between the extremes of Pope and John- son, and of which Schlegel had a sentiment, though merely a^stheticaL The generality, if it extended to the human species, would be common-place, and lack the latency, the novelty which gives both interest and instruction. On the other hand, the latency, if shrunk to personal peculiarities, would become equally uninteresting, for the same reason of insignificance. This is the Charybdis and Scylla of the critics. It is that which has been stated with his curious felicity by the first, and yet the best of their number since Aristotle, in the phrase : Difficile est proprie communia dicere. In fact, the interest of the drama, as of all art, lies intermediate, and ranges in proportion to the purview of the age or audi- ence. Accordingly, while Eschylus and the ancient drama generally kept the sphere of action to the limits of the family, the similar founder of the modern advanced it to larger groupings, in obedience to popular progress in the knowledge of men and nature. What Asia Minor and mere Greece were to the demos of Athens, entire Europe and its confines were to the British of the Eenaissance. The spring of action, the range of character which have been furnished to the ancients by the primitive and the extraneous causation of theology, came, in the moderns, to be widened, and consequently deepened, into the human and intrinsic fatalism of organiza- tion. "What to Eschylus were the houses of the Pelopidre and the Eabdocida?, became to Shakespeare the Teutonic, the Italic, the Celtic races. Such, at all events, is the conse- 12 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. quence of the principles suggested, and to verify the fact is the object of the volume. The manner and defects of the poet's execution, as far as they are noted, follow likewise from that source. He must, doubtless, he abandoned to the common-place criticism on the point of the higher " unities," without defence, though not excuse. If restricted to the latter, Johnson's pleading had heen pertinent. The local audience is an element in the problem of the play-wright. And if the poet, who had to do with a " public gross and dark," to look for "bread to an English pit, 1 more than for fame to posterity, has made Bohemia a sea-board country, Hector argue from Aristotle, and Hamlet swear by St. Patrick, he gave " the pressure of the time." To soar above it had been useless, and thus devoid of art ; for art considers but efficiency, and so has been of the day and district — it being the privilege of science to be ubiquitous and eternal. 1 This melancholy situation of the poet and of the public was wont to find expression in the prologues. For example, in one to the play of Henry VIII., although composed when Shakespeare must have attained to independence : — Those that come to see Only a show or two, and so agree The play may pass, if they be still and willing, I '11 undertake may see away tlieir shilling, Richly in two short hours. Only they That come to hear a merry bawdy play ; A noise of targets ; or to see a fellow In a long motley coat guarded with yellow, etc. What would the poet, who thus ridicules the taste of the sixteenth cen- tury, say, were he to know that, at the noon of the nineteenth, the gravest of his masterpieces would be travestied in London by the participation of a dog, in like costume ! INTRODUCTORY. 13 But though this plea -would shield the artist, it would not shew the genius ; which ceases to he such when it descends from truth to policy. There is, accordingly, a fairer hut deeper excuse for Shakespeare. It is furnished hy a counter- part of the same law of progress ahove indicated in the gene- ral history of the drama, and which is necessarily repeated in its internal organism. If Shakespeare opened, as is shown, a wider province to the art, he must proportionally have receded in the application of the unities. For the ohserv- ance increased in difficulty as the subject in comprehensive- ness, and, on the other hand, as the three unities themselves in relative complexity. The series of this quality is from the person to the place and time, as it, indeed, is stated usually, and may he rendered plain to sense. In fact, the unity has in the category of person a physical groundwork, hy which the attributes constituent of the character are offered con- cretely, and the mind eased of the twofold effort of combining and continuing them. In that of place, the former effort, the combination must he met ; the various characters must he manoeuvred upon an ahstract hut still fixed "basis ; where, however, the relations of locality are co-existent, and even take a suh-emhodiment from the surface of the earth. But this in turn hecomes fluctuant in the category of time, which, without concrete or co-existence, can derive unity hut from the intellect, and hence the difficulty Goethe noted in conceiv- ing an aesthetic whole. Thus it is clear that in full measure as the ground-plan was enlarged, the superstructure of the innovator must fall off in the inverse order — he most defective in the unity pertaining to the Acts, somewhat less so in the Scenes, and least in that of the bare Personages. For the 14 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. dramatists have, in these familiar divisions of the piece, been forced by nature to observe the unities without knowing why, or while deriding them. This procession is accordingly observed in Greek tragedy. Eschylus is strict but on the unity of character, from which almost alone he draws his grandeur, pathos, terror. Sopho- cles advances to the unity of place, and charms by the group- ing of the characters and situations. The unity of time is compassed perfectly, but by Euripides, who is accordingly, by Aristotle, assigned the palm of Greek tragedy ; not only does he, like his rival and respective predecessors, at once edify by character and interest by contrasts, but, in particular, he indoctrinates by the contexture of the fable : all three, however, do these things, not absolutely well, but relatively. The same necessary march in regularity, organization, and also with the same distinctions of inspiration, art, philosophy, recurs in France in Corneille, Eacine, and Voltaire. ISTow, the first of these degrees appears precisely the place of Shakespeare, with the difference explained of an extension of the subject. Hence the burthen of his action lingers in the lowest category. Hence the multitude of personages he is censured for introducing. It was not seen that this is neces- sary as a sort of compensation, Eor want of principles, the action could progress but by adding persons, even as animal organization begins with multipeds to end with bipeds. Shakespeare's plot is, perhaps naturally, like the national constitution, which has no tangible existence beside the mul- titude of the officials. Also, like it, in being executed less by action than by talk. As the edifice could not be raised into the regions of space and time, it must, to have the same INTRODUCTORY. 15 capacity, be strewn along a larger ground : or rather, it was because Shakespeare had built upon a broader basis, that even his genius could not raise it to classic elegance and order. This raster canvas, which presents at once a positive and general unity, remote alike from the extremes of singularity and vague humanity, and wedding novelty to sympathy, is the idea of race. It furnishes a species of action in itself ; admits a multitude of personages to unfold its various aspects, and dissembles, by its physical extension through space and time, the lack of regular observance of the corresponding unities. In this position lies the secret of the Shakespearian drama. Xot, however, that it can in truth dispense with these higher requisites. They constitute the future of the tragic stage in Europe. The drama may still look for a Sophocles and a Euripides, who shall exhibit the several races, drawn by Shakespeare but in portrait ; the former in the altercation of passions and politics, the latter in the combination of principles and social harmony. And these would be the greatest teachers of legislation and social progress. The expectancy assures a long enjoyment of the drama. But the passage in succession of the groundwork of Shakespeare, through these two ulterior unities or grades of organization, puts an end to the progression, if not practice, of the art. Why this shoidd be with the third stage and the principle of race, it would be long and is unnecessary here to discuss. It may be gathered by the thoughtful from the whole exposi- tion. Then the fact, at least, is certified by the examples cited. At two anterior stages, the theatres of Greece and France, the tragic art is found exhausted with a third representative. 16 NEW EXEGESIS OP SHAKESPEAEE. The pullulation of philosophical sententiousness or reflection, which distinguishes ahke the drama of Euripides and of Vol- taire, not only boded the event, hut also pointed to the cause. It was the breaking (to recur to a preceding illustra- tion) of the language of action into that of elocution. 3. If the great revolution thus delineated, in the drama can be shewn to be the key to the writings of Shakespeare, the fact must add fresh laurels to even his fame, give new enjoyment to the world, a new career to exhausted criticism, and, above all, a new resource to commercial exploitation. But the problem is reduced, by the preceding explanations, to the limits of the fundamental category, — that of character. This is also what the critics all consider Shakespeare's forte. Their theme of praise and even apology is his fidelity as moral painter. It is true, as has been seen, that what he painted they could not tell. But they effectually supposed him to stop, like others, with the outside. This conclusion will be sufficiently clear from one reflection : they partake the common notion that men are naturally all the same, and varied merely by condition, climate, calling, or other circum- stances. The essentials, the interior, they assumed through- out identical, and thus were forced upon the consequence that all character was there impossible. From this dilemma arose the air-beating exposed, to define Shakespeare. His speciality, it was discerned, could not have been the exterior, which be- longed to the ancient drama, because most obvious and easy ; for then he could not be so strikingly contrasted with that drama, as aped to pedantry by the least bad of his contempora- ries, Jonson. And, on the other hand, since the alternative of INTRODUCTORY. 17 the interior was flat monotony, it was not seen where else could Shakespeare have found his " infinite variety." The dim reasoning was sound enough, the preconception was the confounder. What was fancied the interior is nothing of the kind : the generalities of human nature are as exterior collectively, as the peculiarities of dress are individually. It is again the nullity of the extremes in all things. Between them lies, in this case, the central ground of race, this true irvt&rioroi humanity, society, and history; and thus alone commensurate to Shakespeare's profusion. This inner man, in fact, is vastly more diversified than the exterior. The latter takes the bent of social manners and physical circum- stances, and exhibits men disguised by imitation, purpose, accident. Beneath these holiday externals works the enginery of race, in all the contrasts of its organism and all the nudity of its uncleanness. To overhaul — if a low expression, but an apt one, be allowed — to overhaul this inner man was the Shakespearian innovation ; to pass in the portrayal of character from the curses of divinities, the incrustations of tradition, and the costumes of history, to the causes of human conduct, to the " livery of nature," as the poet himself expresses it, though he had better said philosophy : for nature is not, like philosophy, opposed to history, but includes it. It is not meant to say that Shakespeare was much deeper than his critics in the consciousness of the new province, or the conception of its characters. The true poet is a philoso- pher by sentiment and not by system ; and all great agents of human progress know but ill their real tendency. It was above explained in principle that the founder of the modern drama should be furnished, by the mythical crystallization 2 B 18 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. of romances, with an outline of the principal diversities of race in Europe, which would serve him as the germs and the types of his new creations. That such, accordingly, were Shakespeare's sources is a well-known fact of history. The logical unconsciousness would therefore argue nothing against the proposed theory of his characters and drama. But, more- over, was he really without the view of races 1 At least on one occasion he throws out a remark which, if it does not prove his consciousness, should have "been sufficient to prompt his critics, and contains more anthropology than all the treatises on this subject. It will "be after comprehended why the systematic statement is peculiarly appropriate to the character of Macbeth, who speaks it to the agents he is sound- ing to murder Banquo — Ay ! in the catalogue ye go for men; As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept All by the name of dogs ; the valued fie Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The Louse-keeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous nature Math in him closed — whereby he does receive Particular addition from the bill That writes them all alike ; and so of men. Act iii. sc. 3. So, in fact, precisely, and in error as in truth ; in the rough cataloguing of the notion still prevailing of human nature, as in the scale of valuation that should rectify hy analyzing it ; and in the form of its organic or social elements, as breeds or races, not either isolated individuals or aggregated species. The only difference is, that the argument is vastly stronger in INTRODUCTORY. 19 the human breeds, in full proportion as they transcend the canine analogues in complication. For, while the extreme individuals touch alike in both the series, the main distinc- tions of the human must rise proportionably to development. It is, in fact, this higher mental development and complica- tion that most conduces to dissemble the oppositions among human races. But is it, then, to be thought that Shakespeare lost all sight of his declared principle, in drawing the charac- ter of Hamlet, of Iago, of Macbeth, and even the secondary personages, who are portion of the picture 1 Nor in the process of the revolution thus effected in the drama does the poet renounce the ancient and exterior aspect wholly. It is a common-place among the critics, that he con- stantly attributes to his personages of all countries the man- ners of his own. But the dictum will be found afterwards to rest a good deal more on their own ignorance of Shakespeare's meaning, than on Shakespeare's of the laws of costume. The truth is, that he might have said, with Posthumus, in Cym- beline : I will begin The fashion less without and moke within. It is a resume of his reform, and the pithiest motto for his future monuments. 4. As to the manner of determining the races depicted, it will be, also, requisite to add a few preliminaries. Since the undertaking is by no means to furnish a complete exegesis of the writings of Shakespeare, but to establish and exemplify a new instrument for that purpose, it must be sufficient to test the leading pieces of the poet. These are 20 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. held to be Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and the part of Shylock, in the Merchant of Venice. And the thesis, in fine, is that the subject of these plays is the Italian, the Teutonic, the Celtic, and the Hebrew races. The tests or the evidence is of a twofold order, which may be distinguished as extrinsic and intrinsic. The external, as consisting of historical presumptions, and of which the facts are common to the several races named, may be suffi- ciently presented on this occasion once for all, and thus the special application be abridged as far as practicable. First among the grounds of these presumptions is the fact, that the heroes and the fables of the several plays in question have been taken almost literally from traditions or romances respec- tively relating to the races just mentioned ; for as, accord- ing to the law of mythical formation above indicated, the real subject of these stories was the corresponding races, it will follow that this import would have passed into the copy, or the dramatic application, even unconsciously to the poet. But, in the next place, all those races were directly known to Shakespeare, and were those only that could have influenced him through sentiment or observation. The Italians were in closer intercourse with England then than now ; they were too feeble to inspire the jealousy that kept a distance with France and Spain ; they were, moreover, the general European mer- chants of the day ; in fine, their literature and arts were at that time the English model, and their papacy intriguing against the new religion : from all these sources the national character must have been familiar and striking, and would, though it had not already been embodied inlago, have moulded Shake- speare's recast of the personage as Italian. The two next INTRODUCTORY. 21 races divided the country itself of Shakespeare, and possibly even his blood. And, for the Jews, they formed already a large community in London, besides the notoriety of their character and literature. To this extrinsic class of evidence may also be appended the acquaintance of British readers of the present day with the same races, and which augments, if not the proof, at least its guarantees of force. But this acquaintance cannot dispense with the intrinsic class of tests. However generally recognizable the main features of these races, the usual desultory indication and analysis are not sufficient. Curiosity might assent, but full conviction would not be wrought ; above all, prejudice, both personal and national, would not be vanquished. To this effect, the exploration should be not only deep in principle, but also general in scope, and systematic in procedure. The identity of the races with the characters of Shakespeare should be tested, not in some and different aspects of humanity, but comprehensively in all, and in each case, with uniformity ; also, not alone in the normahty of the qualities, but in their depravations, which are equally characteristic ; and finally, in the mutual correspondence which the aspects should exhibit towards each other as co-parts of an organism. This triple tissue of correlations would constitute a net from which omission, or evasion, or escape could not be easy. The main lines of the inquiry will accordingly be four : the Mental, the Moral, the Physical phases of human character, with, finally, the Speculative or the social, as a summary. The last department includes religion and fiction, with philosophy ; the physical will be considered but in reference to manners ; the moral will bear chiefly on the 22 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. principle or source ; the mental, on the faculty distinctive of each race. Farther, if the contrasts, in these exhaustive phases, which constitute the several races, could be likewise reduced to law, the process would attain the consummation of science. But the principle of race goes to the depths of social mystery. Suffice it, then, to rest upon some well established positions. Among them is the axiom that every organism, whether physical or moral, must he worked by three forces, consecutive in action and contrary in principle, but, after all, co-operative in the general effect. The first is productive of the mere raw material ; the second, analytic or destructive of its crude texture ; the third is reconstructive or productive in the proper sense. The agencies are represented in single States by classes ; in international communities, like modern Europe, by races. 1 Zoology has traced them in the individual body, by the names of the cellular, the muscular, and nervous tissues, and of which elements the social system should, in fact, be a repetition. With these additional criteria, respectively and relatively, it will therefore be required to show the harmony of Shake- speare. The order of procedure, in function as in history, com- mences with Iago and the Italian race. 1 See an article entitled " Philosophy of History — Niebuhr and Lewis," in the last May number of the North British Review. CHAPTER I. IAGO AS TYPE OF THE ROMANO-ITALIC RACE. 1. The terras of this title present a juxtaposition which may appear insulting as well as paradoxical. But any such impres- sion could, as will be found, arise hut through a common misconstruction of both Iago and the Italians. A word of previous explanation seems, however, to be requisite respect- ing the nationality, before applying it to the alleged type. The true character of the Italian race and nation is mis- conceived through the concurrence of a curious complication of fallacies. The notion, in the first place, is not based, as would be normal, on the actual condition and conduct of this people ; these are virtually discarded by the name of degeneration ; and this, moreover, while the only obvious J cause for such a change is held to produce universally the opposite effect. In the next place, the real basis was the ancient Eoman character, which by the fact of the antiquity, must be imperfectly developed, and from which, at all events, the present people were said to differ. But finally, this standard itself, as imagined, had never an existence in the real Boman world. A brief unravelment of this tissue may 24 NEW EXEGESIS OP SHAKESPEARE. conduce to other ends beside the objects, ethnologic or sesthi- cal, in question. Most the sympathy or cant of foreign countries about Italy, and so the excitement of the natives to perverse effort and distracting hope, proceed from tacit attribution to the actual nationality of full identity with, or heirship to, the storied virtues of the ancient. But these virtues of the Eomans are exaggerated doubly, or through the influence of the medium and of the point of view. They can be known but through the eulogies of poets or historians, mostly native, and attentive but to politics and war. But what conception must be formed of the French or English character from the accounts of it, in these respects, by a few patriotic writers ? Certainly a nation of heroes and sages. And yet the modern writers have been -chastened by the consciousness of jealous supervision by each other, and by other nations ; whereas, with the exception of some supple and subject Greeks, the Eomans could soliloquize their praises to the world. Then, the writers thought at all but of a small and choice minority. The native histories of Borne, as far as touching national character, are histories not of the nation but of a single city ; and in that city, not of the people, but of two contending castes. The subjects were throughout aristocratic or official ; the events, a mere register, the res gestae, of the government. Finally, the records of even this description have been reduced by time to a very few volumes. So that effectually the character transmitted us of ancient Borne is little more than a theatrical or mythi- cal representation. And herein lies, in fact, a providence of history or social progress. The chasm of the dark ages was a gain and not a loss. It engulphed the mere humanities, IAGO. 25 tin,* lower vulgarities of Rome and Grecco, and left tlie grander parts afloat in the enchantment of a mirage. Both these nations were thus set upon the standing stage of history as an ideal example and incitement to posterity. Their annals, arts, philosophies, supplied a theme exhaustless — a species of suasorice — for the maturer minds ; in the same manner that the Bible (besides its salvatory virtues) serves the social end of agitating and developing the popular. It is true, there is something more than self-opinion for Roman greatness ; there are facts on both historical and monumental record. But here it is that the point of view lias interfered with correct judgment. The majority regard antiquity with tacit reference to their own day ; they make no adequate allowance for the change of scene or circum- stances. Scarce is it remembered that the exploits of tin- Romans were achieved, with few exceptions, over - or weak barbarians ; and so the conquerors are credited with the same gentilitial eminence as would suffice to subdue the Europe of the present day as well. The fancy picture is sustained on a back-ground of roads and aque- ducts, despite the rude example of the Mexicans, Peruvians, Chinese, and the fact that at Rome, too, they were the works of social infancy : it is the judgment of an age when railroads are a synonym with civilization. Overhead is set a con- course of conflicting chiefs and clients, by way of halo which receives the name of liberty, with like propriety ; since it rested on the brute slavery of half the national population, and the servitude and plunder of the known world beyond. Such, however, is the notion still prevailing of the Roman race. The second stage of the illusion, in essaying to reconcile 26 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. the actual people of the country with this ideal of the ancient, has hoth their qualities exalted, and their infirmities extenuated. For the public, with a profound instinct, will always bend, in case of conflict, the less important to the more, the state of fact to the truth of principle. It veils the rags of the Italians with the purple of their Eoman ancestry, although this robe be scarce less spurious than the holy coat of Treves ; for in accepting it as genuine, the Eoman character as poetized, there was full reason for eluding the adverse evi- dence of even the senses. The tacit premise was, that the same race cannot have altered fundamentally. And this con- trolling and common sentiment is no mean testimony to the principle. It might be said, indeed, that there was mixture in the case of the Italians. But then the foreign element must have been Teutonic ; and how this famous race, which had been preconized so much, as the regenerator of the blood of all the others throughout Europe, should produce upon the cultivated Eomans but degradation, was a difficulty which debarred Teutonic writers from this issue. It is thus a further tangle in the tissue of illusion. But the escape from this dilemma of degeneracy in the Italians, through either Gothic intermixture or Christian civilization — results rightly deemed incongruous — is not side- ward, but downward ; not by the horns, but between them, into the ground floor of the Eoman character. Here, in fact, would have been found the natural level of the common race. It would be perceived that the difference is mainly in the cir- cumstances ; that this people flourished anciently, as having been in its time and place ; and that it necessarily gave way, with the advancement of society, to races still more gifted, as I AGO. 27 lower races had done to it. It might in this way he conceived, that if the Eomans could revive, with the capacities of their "best days, to competition with actual Europe, they must inevitahly sink into the state of the Italians. It is the simple explanation of the fortunes of this people, and also of the Greeks, another theme of like perplexity. Neither nation was more utterly or savagely oppressed than were the Celtic populations of Gaul and of Spain ; and yet these people, without aid from ancient memories or foreign sympathies, and with their forces still more frittered among paltry feudal sovereign- ties, 1 came, through ages, to wear off the many strata of their conquerors, and gain the unity and independence of their race and of their destiny. To trace, however, the transition from the Eomans to the Italians, it would he requisite to make allowance for certain adventitious elements. The gentilitial properties must undergo refinement, notwith- standing the comparative appearance of decline ; they must appear and really operate, in many things, quite differently in a subjugated people from what they had done in a con- quering. Account should, also, he kept of the commixture of foreign races, persisting still in frontier districts, as for in- stance the Venetian. It is the result of this various triage that might he suitahly confronted with the state of the Italians, to the dispulsion of many an error. But it would he the labour of a treatise, not a paragraph, which is the utmost proper to the present place and purpose. 2. Keeping, therefore, to the type aspects — mental, moral, 1 They amounted in France to from seventy to eighty after the fall of the Carlovingians. 28 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. civil, social — the Koman race may be distinguished by the following traits of character. In the Intellect, a nullity of the organizing faculty ; a feebleness of even reflection ; a pre-eminence of sense, and of that concrete understanding which gains intensity by narrow- ness and clearness by objectivity. These features, positive and negative, are manifest from history. The Eomans never had a reasoner, philosopher, or system ; their few speculative writers Avere transcribers from the Greeks, or raw compilers of facts and fables, such as Varro and Pliny. The dialec- tical susceptibility of the Greeks they stigmatized as fickle- ness ; their own stolidity appeared solidity, because immov- able by such appliances. The only arguments that affected, or speculations that interested them, were the external ones of augury, soothsaying, divination ; and even this religion was a mere ritual, without a semblance of soul or doctrine: the Druid hierarchy and the Gallic dogma of the soul's immor- tality, were to those civilized invaders an inconceivable eccentricity. 1 What they saw, they seized precisely, pro- ' Lucan. Pharsal. 1. i. — Solis nosse Deos et cceli nunrina vobis, Aut solis nescire datum. long-re (Canitis si cognita) vitae mors media est. The whole passage may be cited in Kowe's free translation : — A tribe who singular religion love, And haunt the lonely coverts of the grove ; For these, and these of all mankind alone, The gods are sure revealed or sure unknown. If dying mortals doom they sing aright, 29 Soundly, pertinaciously ; "but it was scarcely above the !, particular and practical. Their sole abstract crea- tion was the code of jurisprudence, "which needed neithi i reason nor reflection, but excludes them ; for law, as being injunctive and conversant with facts, is not for argument or inspiration, but for judgment and definition. Indeed, the ice of this faculty of definition in the Eomans, and its with the prevalence of the contrary in the Teutons, is compound cause of the striking contrast between the Roman law and the English, though the latter be a growth of the like nature and duration. The Moral principle of the Eomans was, like the religion, exterior. It rested on traditionary usage and superstition. The mos m&jorum has even left us the designation itself ; and ethics, too, the Greek equivalent, was of the like- origin. Neither of these nations knew anything of conscience. In the Greeks, it merely dawned in the " demon" of Socrates. The Eomans gave the name, but in the sense of the English consciousness, a mere reflector of things external, not a suggestor of things internal. The term mentioned, in its Teutonic addition of ness, attests decisively the supervention and the source of the new principle. The Erench dialect No ghosts descend to dwell in dreadful night ; No parting souls to grisly Pluto go, Nor seek the dreary silent shades below : But forth they fly, immortal in their kind, And other bodies in new worlds they find. Thus life for ever runs its endless race, And like a line death but divides the space ; A step whi.ch can but for a moment last, A point between the present and the past. 30 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. was content with a duplicity of acceptation. In the mother Eoman tongue, the earliest use of conscientia in any really moral sense descends as low, perhaps, as Tertullian ; x and therefore fell within the influence of a foreign religion and even race. The Eoman morals thus were physical, external, forrnalistic ; the result of examples or omens or oaths. Hence it is that in their code there were no quarrels between law and equity, as in the English, where the latter " breaks the teeth" of the former. The supreme test of Eoman morals lay in minding but the end. Hence the maxim of its truest priesthood, that the end justifies the means. Hence the singular pertinacity with which the race pursued their ends, and their unscrupulousness in the violence, and the fraudu- lence of the means ; — the former, from inadequacy of reflec- tion to suggest motives, to divert by new objects, or new- aspects of the old ; the latter, for want of reasoning power to organize the means so as to reach the end legitimately, with- out physical or moral force. The Eomans, in the minor morality of Manners, or in personal civilitude, were rather gracious than polite, and the great dependent body, ceremonious to slavishness. Impres- sionable on the exterior, but impassive in the interior, they were courteous without being cordial, and dignified without being delicate. They lacked the sympathy, the humanity to reach the import of the word gentleman, for which there was 1 This was the opinion of the late Sir Wm. Hamilton ; hut it is not strictly correct. Quintilian employs it in nearly the modern sense, and even as a proverh, which implies a higher date : Conscientia mille testes. L. v. xi. It was, however, here conceived as a mere sentiment, not a principle. 1AG0. 31 accordingly no term in their language. Their rank "would have been low in the chivalry of after ages, and their descend- ants in fact hut traded, instead of aiding, in the crusades. All these features consort duly with the Physical complexion, where the element of cellularity and generation was predomi- nant The Roman soldiers viewed the Gauls and the Ger- mans as giants. Their own constitution inclined to the effeminate, and was held back so long from this abyss of their decay, but by their full five hundred years of scarcely inter- mitted warfare. Naturally, their activity, their courage, and their conquests, were as feminine as their ambition, their cruelty, and their voluptuousness. In the public or Social aspect, the race Avas patriotic, as distinct from both the personal and philanthropic opposites. The patriotism, as the name declares, was an attachment to the land, in due agreement with the merely physical or con- crete compass of the intellect : not of the people to each other, nor of each one to himself. Rome was territorially regarded by the liomans what " home " is individually re- garded by the Teutons, The tendency was, therefore, adverse to dispersion and favoured unity, but the unity of aggrega- tion, not of organization. It was this tendency that led them to the conquest of the world, and this deficiency that them to begin losing it as soon as conquered. It is what Floras called so well the preaurrentis imperii impetus. This huddled empire was a mere agglomeration without cement, a concretion made by force about the nucleus of patriotism. The only germ of organization was the camp and the municipium, or both conjoined in what was termed the military colony ; and these were garrisons, or stations for making roads and 32 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. forcing taxes. Nor could the system be but physical, with- out abstractive and reasoning faculty. Thus the government was, like the nation^ paternal or despotical ; and when this spirit of domination at length collapsed in the national family, it reappeared in the contentions of the natural families, the Houses. Of course, the general ambition was, conformably, power and place, and the instrument, where force was wanting, corruption, and, therefore, money-getting. Hence the usury of the rustic Eomans, as the commerce of the Italians. Now these defects are all dissembled in the ideal of the Eomans. In the conquerors of the world, their rustic ignor- ance was simple virtue, their dull contempt of the subtle Greeks a deep conclusion of solid sense, their utter lack of conscientiousness a stoic fortitude of character, their formulis- tic superstition a religious scrupulosity, their civic impotence of organization a nice regard to public liberty, their blind avidity of power and conquest a civilizing magnanimity. When, on the other hand, the same people have from masters become servants, the mask of poetry slips off, and leaves the personage to nature. For with mankind, in case of nations as well as individuals, not merely is it true, that " A saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn," but the saint becomes a sinner upon sinking from lawn to crape. Such, accordingly, is the real estimate as well as state of the Italians. "With these too, then, as with the Eomans, the utmost mental power is that perceptive penetration which makes historians and politicians ; also, in aesthetics, painters, and pragmatists in science. Scarce more than Eome have they IAGO. 33 ever had a reasoner or philosopher. In even scholastics, their Aquinas was no more than a hare summist, and of Aristotle, Plato and the Canon law alike : " £t disputait de tout, sans s'cn douter de rien," as his logic was felicitously hit off by Voltaire. Their highest • in philosophy are hut theosophy, profane or Chris- tian — from the physical religion of Jordano Bruno to the religious physics and politics of Gioberti. Another of the latest of their thinkers, Mastrofini, names his hook " A scien- tific treatise of the human soul ;" and, verily, the work is not unworthy of the title. They have, however, made important contributions to serious science ; but by discoveries of obser- vation or experiment, not of deduction. In any systematic views they stopped with " mixed mathematics," that is to say, mechanics, the simpler physics, and anatomy. Da Vinci, the true originator of the method called Baconian, was accus- tomed to say " mechanics are the paradise of mathematics." The metaphor, it is perceived, is variously Italian ; and no less so is the area thus accorded to science ; for he probably conceived the only science to be mathematics. The physical ground, which thus gave potency to Galileo and to Borelli, produced also the skilful physicians and great anatomists of the Italians ; for anatomy is a sort of zoological me- chanics. The same genius it was, too, that conducted an Italian to the hydrostatic law of the circulation of the blood. In fine, their science has never passed beyond this physical or overt ground. On attempting the abstract, the interior, the elemental — in the globe as in the government — they fall forthwith into superstition. Hence it is that their political organism is a theocracy, as with their ancestors it was 34 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. the puerile paraphernalia of divination. On the similarly secret workings of the earth, that is geology, their speculative notions were of the same character ; such as the " starry influence," " sports of nature," Noah's deluge, " fermentation of fatty matter " — the last, however, being Teutonic. Their mental range did not permit their even falling into alchemy. Lihri, in his History of the Mathematics in Italy, has well remarked this contrast with the mania of the Teutons ; but he was far from thinking that the cause could be disparaging. He, however, observes, that this appearance of good sense is controverted by their special predilection for astrology} Both the positive and negative phenomena are now explained : astrology regarded motion, exterior and visible ; but alchemy, mutation, interior and occult ; and, therefore, while the former was congenial to the Italians, the latter could allure but a race of personality, attentive to the transmutations of disposition within itself. The Moral conformation is in keeping with the mental. The Italians are in ethics as exterior as the Eomans. The principle is still the family, either ethnical or natural ; all things for Italy against the world beyond, and within Italy, all things equally against Italians, for one's own family. Such are the two commandments. The Prince of Machiavel is but a detailed commentary. Doubtless, the word conscience is intruded upon the language ; but the name has in reality no echo in the people. It is this moral puzzle that occasions at the same time the encouragement and obstacle of Pro- testant reformers. These zealous people hear Italians speak with rapture of conscience, Bible, and with levity of their 1 Histoire des Matliematiques en Italie, torn, ii., p. 122. 35 osvn clergy, and even of their creed ; and they "believe it can be no tiling but the working of the "spirit." They do not call to mind that vapnlation of even their gods has been a practice with primitive nations, who yet would instantly die to vindicate them ; nor perceive that the Italians, beneath a form, of course, more polished, have but a creed of the like puerile and aesthetics! exteriority. They, then, conclude that, to release the whole peninsula from Satan, no more is needed than to get entrance for a quantity of the Bible. How different, however, are the melancholy results ! Though this libe- rator does sometimes elude the quarantine, which is opposed by the paternal supervisors to the pestilence, it has been long observed — no doubt less piously than perspicaciously — that the Italian, in his Bible, sees but politics or pounds sterling ; in plainer words, that the convert chouses the English amateur missionary. The Italian could be still as jpantheonic as his fathers, were it not for the control of other races on the religion. The Manners, like the physique, remain similarly Boman. The Italians are civil, but also sly and secret. Their inter- course, like all the rest, is fashioned on the family, political or private, with the church and the theatre. But the two latter, although public, are much a dumb show ; the other converse takes the form of conspiracy or of intrigue. Love first, and then ambition, are the foci of Italian manners ; as in the Boman it was rather first ambition and then love. It has been wondered why it is that the Italians have no novels. But the absence is in rigorous accordance with this character. The staple of novels and romances is love : but love with the Italian is practical, like all the rest ; it is physical, not 36 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. sentimental ; a tiling for action, not dissertation. But more- over, the mode of treating it in novels was obnoxious. The fulcrum of the action is revolt against the family ; and hence this sort of fiction had its rise, or has its vogue, among a race of personality, of which the end is this revolt. With the Italians, a race of family aggregation and despotism, the idea would be more shocking than the grossest of intrigues. For the intrigue, with due connivance, would not overtly assail the reputation of the house or the authority of the parents. A final illustration, not less strong for its flimsy ground, of this persistence of the Pater Romanics is the following : — While with even the French, it would be taken for burgess breeding to name one's father by his title, or as Monsieur mon pere, with the Italians the addition of the title or plain il signor is the habitual form, even with equals, in the best society. Finally, in the Social and systematic aspect, the Italians like their ancestors, tend to unity of aggregation. Catho- licism is a following-up of the world-conquest of the Romans, with the expedient, imposed by weakness, of changing arms for intrigue. It is in essence as despotic, pertinacious, one- ideaed ; as is also, in the civil sphere, the famous " Italian unity." Both the unities, moreover, are pursued with the old unscrupulousness. Not from profligacy, as is charged, but rather from a mental weakness, the absorption of the gentili- tial faculty in the end, and its inaptitude to evolve means, or to control them when presented. The high repute of papal policy is a puerility like itself. The thing is but a routine cunning, not a rational conception, and endures, not through the art, but through the lowness, of the structure. Those who do not recognise a fixed law in the solar system, IAGO. 37 could nof rationally be admitted to proceed upon it in the social Accordingly, Italians, who perceive no such abstrac- tions, see reform but in the dagger, refutation in the Inquisi- tion, retribution but in Dante's hell, and God himself but in his concrete mother. "When the Eomans lost the physical d of an army, they fell an easy prey to the parti- tion of barbarians. When their Italian offspring recovered independence, the use to which they put it was to aggravate the dissolution, push it down to the municipia, the sole Roman organization. Upon this gentilitial basis they proclaimed the " free cities ; : ' communities, indeed, so free as to be desti- tute of law, and to have their functions fought for in the street by rival families. But these contentions, both internal and among the petty states, were an endeavour to restore the ancient armed despotism — armed for the Ghibelines, ecclesi- astical for the Guelphs. And so the race, with its mental constitution, must do again, were the Italians free to-morrow and abandoned to themselves. They should, however, have the freedom so well earned by them in their day, but, with the guarantee to Europe, of an imported organization. 1 1 This is perhaps now on the eve of being accomplished, through the medium of either a congress or campaign. It is at all events so normal in the future course of things, that France should be the social organiser of Italy, that, as is known lo persons who will perhaps read tlnsi- lines, the writer has for several years back been predicting the event as the inevitable issue to the " Italian question." The less opposition, then, given by England, the wiser. Her resistance, which is known to be the chief reliance of Austria, could only serve to aggravate the most complete exposure, that perhaps ever has been made upon the public stage of Europe, of inefficient promises and insincere professions. For the past generation, the two themes of press and parliament were the liberal and classic sympathies of Englishmen with Italy, and their 38 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. This sketch, though meagre for the subject, is sufficient for the purpose of showing the full identity of the Eomans and Italians, and dispelling misconceptions about the common character. It will, beside, dispense with like preliminaries henceforth. A single race defined becomes, through certain laws of contrast, a compendious exponent to the others in the unutterable execration of her oppressor Austria. But when a neigh- bour, who was also often joined in the impeachment, steps in to substi- tute, on the contrary, solid deeds for declamations, then forthwith, as by enchantment, the- situation is inverted ; the oppressed become aggressive, ambitious, in short impertinent ; and the oppressor is a just ruler who stands up nobly for his rights ! What is most curious and profoundly characteristic in this somerset, was the quite instantaneous concurrence of the whole nation. It reminds one of those creatures, which, if you touch the sporo-cyst on which they colonize, pull all together in their heads. Were France to gain no farther triumph on the subject than this, it would be quite a diplomatic Waterloo as against England, in the confi- dence and credit of the Liberals of Europe. With the least open- eyed of these, it is now a settled dogma, that liberty and classicality in English declamations mean no more than, like the rest, a paying article of traffic ; in short a selfishness, that wraps the nation like the membrane called " proligerent." r It is perhaps still possible to muffle up this infamy by cordially co-operating in the settlement of Italy ; opposing French " ambition," but admitting her institutions. These in fact alone can be of any avail. The English would but bring back the chaos of the middle ages, thus transferred from the extremities to the centre of civilization. Nor does the example of Sardinia offer an objection. For this experiment is, in the first place, as yet but few years old. In the next, it is viewed less as an object than an instrument, a means of bringing Italy beneath the rule of Sardinia, and so would be respected, however uncongenial. In the third place, the Sardinians are not purely Italic, but predominantly Gaulish, and thus fitter to resist its tendencies. But finally, they had already an organization of their civil institutes, which counteracted its dispersiveness and limited its sphere. It is thus the IAGO. 39 In conclusion, the full consistency of the two stages of this race may be exemplified (if due regard be had to difference of principle), in the Saxons of the days of piracy, and the English of the age of commerce. For the motive of the race, its ruling passion of " acquisitiveness" continues here, likewise, essentially the same. The change of means, from force to artifice or fraud, is quite extraneous ; imposed by subjugation, civilization, in short, circumstances. " The proud peer (says Walter Scott, in his novel of ' Waverley'), who can now only ruin his neighbour according to law, by protracted suits, is the genuine descendant of the Baron, who wrapt the castle of his competitor in flames, and knocked him on the head as he endeavoured to escape from the conflagration." But still more direct is the lineage from the viking to the merchant, who invades reluctant countries (as the phrase was) to " gather property." With the aid, perhaps, of sympathy, an American philosopher 1 has recently discerned and described this truth with force. By way of paying the usual tribute to the " energy" of the race, he remarks that the piracies of the Channel and the Mediter- ranean only ceased Avhen " it was found that they would no longer pay," the people of these countries having learned to British parliament is a Jiors-d'ceuvre to the Scotch people, who enjoy their own civil and congenial organization ; derived too in no small part i'rom the same source as the Sardinian. And the fact that this sub- struction, laid in Italy by French rule, has been maintained not only here but even in the hostile States — nay by the Germans themselves, whom it half extricated from their chaos — this striking fact attests the source from which must also be expected a second, and a higher wave of orga- nization, the political. 1 Emerson's " English Traits.'' 40 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. resist. And the motive seems assigned with no less shrewd- ness than the object, if conclusions may be drawn from many a raid of later times, in regions gradually removed from the control and eye of Europe. Another instance of the analogy, where the conditions are confronted, may he noted in the same race — to wit, Americans, North and South. The South, with its commixture of democracy and slavery — the former, hut the many-headed mode of despotism ; the slavery, hut piracy, not fitful, but en permanence, and of the life and labour of men offering nothing else — the southerners, with this commixture of democracy and slavery, their agricul- tural industry and political ambition, their fierce spirit of independence and elevation of sentiment, are not without resemblance to the Romans of the Republic. The northerners, and more especially the pure English or Yankees proper, who from the surface of the character would scarce appear of the same race, and who but veil the same avidity beneath the trickiness of trade, and the grudging execration of the southern monopoly — these people of the Free States pre- sent a similar analogy to the Italians of the days of Free Cities and of commerce ; with the gentilitial contrast of pur- suing pelf for its own sake, not as a medium of power, like the Italians of even Venice. But Iago, the alleged type of the race and day, was a Venetian. 3. On the other hand, this character itself is misconceived, but in the opposite direction from the Roman and Italian. Iago is supposed to be a villain of the vulgar stamp ; one who tramples upon conscience, upon honesty and humanity, IAGO. 4 1 with desperate defiance of their ordinary opposition. But it is now seen that the first of these influences is wholly absent, and the others deeply modified, in the Italian race. As representative of this race, then, Iago would be less perverse. He would have acted more from negative than positive impul- sion, more from moral insensibility than brutalized depravity. And this must be consistently the point of view of the cha- racter. As commonly interpreted, it would be undramatic ; for nothing is dramatic that is brutal or vulgar. To wade deliberately through all crime in prosecution of selfish ends could excite only disgust or horror, and would at best be merely monstrous. But to do so with a latent sentiment of the legitimacy of the course, and under influence of a parti- cular view of morals, is full of interest. For this unfolds to curiosity a new vista in human nature, and self-knowledge is the spring of public interest in the drama. Such, accord- ingly, is the sentiment excited by Iago, not at all disgust or horror, notwithstanding his reckless villanies. And so the fact of the special interest of this play becomes a proof, that the true import of the character can only be a type of race : that is to say, not a perverted individual, which suggests nothing, but a cast of organization and a stage of social progress that reveal to different races a latent phase of the common .Nor, it seems evident, was Shakespeare at all unconscious •it this import. Too great a painter not to execute as studi- ously by shade as light, not to characterize his personages by on as well as action, he makes Iago say as little about himself and do as much, as he makes Hamlet, for example, Lich and do little: it is a, case of the law of contrast 2 c 42 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. which. Avill hold generally of these races — the race of preach- ing and agitation, and the race of intrigue and conspiracy But notwithstanding this ohservance of the gentilitial cha- racter, Iago is made to open the following glimpse into his principles — And what's he then that says, I play the knave ? When the advice I give is free and holiest, Probable to thinking, and indeed the course To win the Moor again. Here the speaker is made to vindicate, sincerely as in soli- loquy, against the prevalent morality, a particular system — a system based on the external circumstances, irrespective of the motive. The occasion is the counsel which Iago gives to Cassio to ask the mediation of Desdemona with her husband. The cashiered lieutenant was "free" to take the counsel or not. To court the favours of men in power through such a medium was becoming — that is, " honest" in the sense of the Italians as the Eomans ; for the poet has shown a nicer understanding of the word ho nest us than the pedants who debate his Latin have yet done of even his English. Beside, the result must "seem probable" -to Cassio himself, who thus would act from his own reason, not the "knavery" of any one. In fine, Iago believed that it was " indeed the course." Where could, therefore, be the ground for supposing him a "knave?" Singly and solely, in the motive of the advice. It is the only element omitted by the poet, who doubtless meant to show that with Iago it went for nothing, whereas it was the whole with the public of Shakespeare. In this con- trast lies the play and the profundity of the portraiture. Iago could not think that what was objectively irreproachable IAGO. 43 might be altered in its moral laws by the state of his private consciousness ; this criterion is of force but with the race of personality, with whom the conscience in morality, the private judgment in religion, and the ego in philosophy, or rather metaphysics, hold the laws of both divine and physical nature in contingence. The Italian sees such potencies but in a "special Providence," And there being, in this instance, no deus ex mackina, Iago was obliged to deem the counsel he gave Cassio to have continued good and moral in itself. Then, if he had the secret view that it would serve himself ulteriorly, this end, besides being also good and moral in iL« //'—the vindication of his family honour, and elevation of his rank — this selfish end was, in the first place, a matter very difficult, and which would need some logic to link it morally with the counsel, and, in the next place, would, moreover, like all ends with the Italian, appear sufficient to justify the necessary means. This strict analysis of the sentiment, if not the argument, of Iago shows how fully the conception of the poet had reached the truth. It must be owned that he, however, sometimes sullies it, as above, by the use of such expressions as knavery ,'iinl villany, applied to Iago by himself; also by certain details of wanton consciousness, no less incongruous. But these are usually so obtrusive, so gratuitous to the occasion, that they were probably a tribute to the " conscience" of an English public. This public, too, as Shakespeare knew, dislike your refined inuendo ; they require to have things plumpt them quite directly by the name, and do not like the name the less when it is "hard" or vituperative. Then, besides, this lJutch procedure of labelling the portrait was peculiarly 44 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESFEAEE. convenient when the subject was Italian — a character which, as "being opposite, is inconceivable to the English. The fact was above exemplified in matters of religion. It is famous in the notion still prevailing of Machiavael's " Prince," who is Iago theorized or set upon a loftier stage ; for the irony or the immorality, imputed oppositely to this work, is the naivety which forms the bouquet (so to speak) of the Italian character. But, beside this double exigence of subject and of public, there was also an apology in the nature of Shakespeare's drama. The special object, in this system, being the interior of the character, the action must be seconded by verbal analysis ; and so the personage, in the soliloquies where this was feasible with least uncouthness, was forced sometimes to take the place of an objector or the ancient chorus. Thus, in the passage above cited, Iago calls himself a "knave," not because it was in consonance with the character to say or think so, but because it was required as a pretext or a thesis in reply to which to show to the audience, who held the notion, that there were modes of moral sentiment not dreamt of in their ethics. The expedients, both of circumstance and system, may be blemishes ; but the sesthetical drawback is amply made up in philosophy. It must be under the same influence of a local adaptation that the second place is given in the piece to Iago : that is, suppose the title to allude to this subordinance, or be, in point of fact, of the poet's imposition. Of this there are historical reasons to doubt. But at all events the order of the characters is manifest. The notion of the critics who, deluded by the title, agree in giving, sans s'en douter, the place of hero to the Moor, goes to pervert and puerilize IAGO. 45 the wliole economy of the piece. This, they say, is the exhibition of the passion of jealousy, no doubt a novel and instructive spectacle both on and off the stage. Iago is thought no more than the mere instrument of provoking it. go is, on the contrary, the soul and axis of the play, no whit less fully than even Hamlet and Macbeth are of pieces. Othello is a mere instrument, like Cassio or Koderigo, with the mere difference of degree, in the unwind- ing of the Italian character. He is even superfeted upon that character, in every sense. There is no trace of him in the original Italian novel of Iago, whence this character in all ails has been taken by the poet. Othello would be I at on an ItaHan stage. But if wept at on an English, the fact is no less consonant. His soldier bluntness, his blustering honesty, and simple-mindedness were here intelli- gible, while the calm and keen intriguer inspired the opposite antipathy. It was this contrast that obliged Shakespeare to give the personage its prominence, and led him also (if not the managers, avIlo know their public) to name the piece from it. The correction appears pregnant with various sug- gestions. It indicates the calibre and information of Shake- speare's critics. It exemplifies his adaptations to the taste of the nation; a complacency to which, as will be evident hereafter, should be charged a great part of his imputed larities. In fine, this restitution of Iago to his rank was indispensable to the significance which is now given to the character; and this was also a decent duty before pro- g to compare it with a glorious, a beneficent, and an unfortunate people. 4b NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. 4. The comparison is much abridged by these preliminary explanations. In the intellectual aspect, Iago fits exactly. He is void of all reasoning, nay, reflection in the proper sense ; the passage quoted is among the highest efforts in both kinds, and it is seen to be in keeping with the gentili- tial compass. He is spoken of by Schlegel, in his lectures on the drama, as a " man of information, and even a thinker in his way. " But what this way was, the German critic had but very loose notions of, and seems to do no more than take the word of Othello. Iago, in even his plotting, is merely pragmatic and perspicacious. He proceeds always upon habits, not on principles of conduct. His course is commonly determined ex re nata or incidentally ; but yet is done adroitly, because he remains cool : and this Italian qxiality of self-possession or self-suppression is a result, not of will, as is imagined, but of temperament, permitted by the feeble- ness of ratiocinative circumspection. Hence in all men the increased daring from dementing drink or passion, and the dexterity of the sleep-walker from a curtailment of his powers of intellect. The mental compass of Iago is painted admirably by Othello : " He knows all qualities of human dealings with a learned spirit" understanding by the "learned spirit" the skill of mere experience. The secondary characters are, too, of the like stamp. Even Brabantio, a grave senator, lacks the reason or reflection to dip beneath the surface, the visibilities, of things, enough to comprehend how it could be that his fair daughter was brought to love a black man by any other means than magic. This magic is, moreover, as national as the mind. It forms, with religion, the etiology of the race. The one TAGO. 47 explains the outer, the other the inner world. It has been seen that from the Soman days of Pliny or Lucretius, all their speculative efforts, not entirely theological, have turned, like the race itself, upon the ground of physical nature. But the infancy of natural philosophy is magic ; it continues to bo treated in this character by even Bacon. The earliest of Italian philosophers, Bruno, held that tellurem totam habita- bilem esse intus et extra, et innumerabilia animantium complecti turn nobis sensibilium turn occultorum genera. From this cpieer theory arose the Paracelsian sylphs and gnomes. The race is as notoriously conformable in prac- tice. The Italians are the worthy descendants of Canidia, the modern confectioners of potions and poisons. It is remarkable that the earliest and first transgression upon record, as committed by the famous Boman matrons against their lords, had been the wholesale poisoning of a large number of the senators. Their descendants of the middle ages had not lost the art or use. This disposition made also great physicians as well as mountebanks. It is, in sum, that the Italian conceives power in all its mysteries to lurk in the interior of physical bodies and the earth, as with the Teuton this fount of magic or of miracle is within man. So systematically is this view of the Italians held by Shakespeare, that a member is called in for all such ends throughout his plays. An Italian was the maker of the potion for Imogen ; and she herself exclaims expressly — That drug-damned Italy hath out-craftied him. So -luliot is killed by the potion of Friar Laurence. But the appearance of this personage himself upon the stage, monolo- 48 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. guizing to the earth, and with his herb-basket in hand, is the most perfect and profound impersonation of the race. I must up hill this ozier cage of ours, With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers. The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb ; What is her burying grave, that is her womb ; And from her womb children of divers kinds We sucking on her natural bosom find. *■■"■*■** ! mickle is the powerful grace that lies In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities. * * % * Within the slender rind of this weak flower, Poison hath residence and medicine power, etc. lago, as a soldier, is not much in the line of magic. He presents anything of this kind but indirectly in his images. These all turn on the modes of operation of physical nature. When he sees that his hints begin to tell upon Othello, his notion of the moral process is revealed in the exclamation, " work on my medicine." v He also describes the jealousy, attained to its height, by saying that " it burns like the mines of sulphur." The very " thought" of his own jealousy "gnaws his inwards like & poisonous mineral." Thus every abstract operation is presented to his mind, but in the guise of a laborious percolation through a mass of matter — this slow and subtle penetration being the mode of action of the national intellect. His " invention comes from his pate, as bird-lime does from frize." Again, lago, in a set simile, compares the body to a " garden," where the virtues and the. vices may be planted like cabbages ; the will (not reason), which he calls the " gardener," being complete arbiter of the crop. This comparison is probably not borrowed from the 49 novel j and yet nothing could be possibly profounder in its consonance, both psychological and agricultural, with the character of the race. For the point of view of this race immerges man in physical nature, and thus gives him the same laws of cultivation and production. Cicero subjected the .body politic to the like processes ; he sighed for a restorer of the tottering republic, in the shape of a good husbandman, to cultivate it like a field. The other personages of the play betray the same physicality. Brabantio specifies the " charms'' that seduced his daughter as "drugs that toedken motion;" " mixtures powerful o'er the blood" ~No doubt this crass materialism will be questioned by the artists, who are wont to think the Italians the most spiritual of nations. Yet the same critics would reproach the same Italians, in the same breath, with being materializers of the Christian spiritualities. And this they were, in fact j but for the cause that they are artists. Thus not merely is the mental range material and prac- tical but further, Iago shows directly and expressly the Bomano-Italian contempt for theory. His slur upon the "bookish theoric" is passed into a byword with a people who confine on the Italian in this trait. "With him all knowledge of this order is but " prattle without practice." To Cassio, of whose military science he is speaking, he gives also the sneering title of a "great arithmetician" — this infant science being, with astrology (to which Iago refers as seriously), in the same vogue with the Italians that Horace bantered in the Eomans. 1 And he explains the sneer accordingly in calling 1 Epist. ad Pisones. — To ber own Greeks the Muse benignant gave With grace to write, with grandeur to conceive ; D 50 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. Cassio a " counter-caster." The prepossessions of that day as to Italian science considered, there are few things more profoundly observed by Shakespeare than this trait. It may "be fancied to have meant the rude contempt. of a soldier, and thus to he descriptive of a class or rather calling. But then it would be utterly unsuited to Iago, who really betrays no- thing of the soldier but the title ; it might be so conceived in the mouth of Othello. Moreover, the derogations were addressed to a civilian, and for an end implying the general assent to their spirit. Besides, on the other hand, the spirit is Italian. An example may be witnessed down to even the present day, in the notorious aversion of the thinking class of Italy alike for French science and for German metaphysics. The latter they regard as little better than insanity, and the method of the Trench revolts by what appears conceit. Their long resistance to both the pests, they vaunt, themselves, as distinct judgment. Foreign writers rather set it to jealous pride of their ancient glories, or to political resentment towards the particular countries. But the fundamental cause is intellectual insufficiency, a merely Their tuneful tongue to loftiest strains to raise — For Greeks were covetous of only praise. Our Roman youth are taught the nobler art, To sift a farthing to its hundredth part : Come, son of Albion, 1 say, if from a crown You pay five shillings, what remains your own ? — I put a cypher to the Debit side. — Well done, my lad, you'll be your country's pride. 1 A slight metrical liberty has been taken with the text, the Latin being films Albini. I AGO. 51 practical and physical, but thus far powerful, cast of mind. It is this that made and makes their ancient greatness and their actual weakness. It rendered them disciplinable into a machine, that overran a primitive world based on fictions of imagination. But in a world reconstructed more or less up«n abstract laws, it leaves them, equally, to agitate in inco- hesion and imbecility. The Moral principle of the race was determined to be tra- dition; it is the family morality, as opposed to the personal. Now Iago, who would really be a " villain " by the latter, is indued by the great poet, as by the legend, with the former. The very end, and thus the genuine Italian criterion, is made to be the vindication of the family morality. Iago must avenge the seduction of his wife. Nay, like Caesar himself, he must avenge the mere suspicion : " I, for mere suspicion in that kind. Will do as if for surety. He does not, indeed, storm in the manner of Othello ; that is not the genius of his character and race : but still the very " thought can gnaw him like a poisonous mineral." The method of revenge is no less curiously conformable. It is the primary and simplest of the rules of moral justice, the lex l< i li< mis, this homoeopathy of jurisprudence. Similia simili- Ints, jealousy for jealousy, or, in his own expression, " wife for wife." And here is seen the logic of the part of Othello ; which, instead of being the purpose of the piece, as supposed vulgarly, is but among the means of bringing out Iago's character. So surely was the trait of family vengeance the view of Shakespeare, that, for such ends, he takes Itabans no less constantly than for poisoning : and, in truth, jealousy 52 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. is a poisoning applied to the moral system : " Poison his delight," cries Iago to Eoderigo, in setting him after the Moor. Not merely is the use recurred to where the subject is Italian, and he might be, therefore, thought to have but copied the pro- priety ; but even in plays where the Italian is a stranger of pure creation. Thus in the Celtic play of Cymbeline, when some one is required to rend the conjugal attachment of Imogen and her exiled husband, the great poet does not scruple to anti- cipate the course of time, and carry back a cool and conscience- less Italian of the middle ages. Did he not also divine that there was really no anachronism, the import being, not an Italian, but the common Eoman race 1 It is, in fine, the same family morality of the Italians that allows them to use the dagger for their country, this common family. The other motive of Iago — the prosecution of the " lieu- tenancy " — is equally protected by this family morality. Power, rank, and reputation are the ambition of this social stage, and serve, in consequence, to palliate the darkest deeds in the pursuit. This notoriously is the moral spirit of Italian politics of all times. Even in the Eoman senate it was only more concentred ; it was Eome against the world, and was sanctified as patriotism. 1 This extension was, in the day as in the Decalogue of Machiavel, broken up among a score of petty independent states, where all atrocities that aggrandised each prince or people passed for virtue. Within each petty state, again, the rival factions or the families were actuated towards each other by exactly the same ethics. And this has all its solid reason, like the other peculiarities. It is 1 Cicero's " offices'' are Greek, not EomaD, ethics ; a translation of Panaetius the Stoic. IAGO. 53 that position and reputation are there a family possession • the elevation of a single member is reflected on the whole kindred \ his degradation is, on the other hand, a loss in the like communion. But it is plain that each family will he indulgent on the means of either gaining or retaining this common treasure of the group ; and as the other groups do likewise, the moral laxity was general. The check upon it from group to group and stage to stage was physical force, which is accordingly the law of social union in this race. When the Eomans attained this unity through centuries of blood and crime, they made their own ethics uniform, and imposed it on the world ; and if Borgia or his rivals had succeeded in their aims, they would restore the same order, and proceed to make it general. But European society was not then in the days of Bomulus. In advancing it, the mission of the race was expended, and the stratum of a new one passing into the system. This being duely a race, itself, devoid of family or morality — the individual only being each one's code as his concern — it was destined to effect the dissolution of the Pioman structure, as well in morals as in politics, and from the Empire to the Family. It is true, its oavii standard Avas still more arbitrary and disorderly. But here admire the curious mechanism of nature ! or, if Ave will, the " Eternal cause, educing good from ill." Every Teuton AA^ould, no doubt, impose his " conscience" and " private judgment" upon mankind, no less tyrannically than Tiberius or Hilde- brand. But the difference, the preference, the progress lay in this : the Teuton Avas not backed by the thunders of Rome or Heaven. He had only his own muscle to 54 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. enforce his own morality. But as every other Teuton had the like arms and authority, with also a divergent, "because selfish, view of the use of them, the general consequence has been that they must severally be content with finding vent for their personality in disturbing the laws of heaven, but that, on earth, the private standards were all effectually neutralized, and the result the mere physical criterion of force or number : for democracy and despotism meet, in morals as well as politics. And in this way has been, or will be, elimi- nated from society both the disorder of the personal, and despotism of the family, morals. The visionary principles destroying each other mutually, the facts alone will remain, and remain open to observation. And on this basis will be raised by, of course, a different race, the social ethics of positive science, of all humanity, and of true divinity. Were this philosophy of Italian morals not imaged mythi- cally in his sources, it is scarce possible that even Shake- speare could have seized it as he has done. Iago plots to gain the lieutenancy for the position and not the pay. Money he regards as an instrument, not the object. This is the true spirit of the famous exhortation reiterated to Eoderigo : "put money in thy purse." His suggestion is, that money can compass all objects, even the possession of Desdemona : and what he really looks for himself, in the advice, is not so much to pluck the goose, as to promote his family ends of wresting vengeance from the Moor, or the lieutenancy from Cassio. Eeputation is the sole topic on which he rises to philosophy. The passage is too famous to require the space of citing. " Good name in man and woman is the immediate (intimate or precious) jewel of the soul," etc. The poet, with fine IAGO. 55 propriety, gives it the eloquence of sincerity, not the emphasis of hypocrisy, as is the prevalent conception. Though Iago was at the moment himself " filching " the jewel from others, it was because it seemed the means of restitution of his own, or at least of revenge, which to the " soul " is a substitute ; and also because he wanted the logic to be consistent. And if the famous simile, " Who steals my purse steals trash," re- ceives in England a more boisterous applause than it may in Italy, it is possibly from an hypocrisy less doubtful than Iago's, or perhaps only from a keener sentiment of the ratio of the sacrifice. The very epithet of " honest," so much lavished on Iago, is not an irony of the poet, but an ambition of the personage. To the acquaintances who used it, he must be supposed known for the habit or the hobby of aspiring to the distinction. Shakespeare finely shades the sentiment down to even the adjurations. " As I am an honest man, I thought so." " I am a very villain else." " If ever I did dream of such a matter, abhor me." Thus the oaths of Iago all refer to reputation, as if this were deemed more sacred than his soul or his God. No doubt, they also would consort, and perhaps such was Shake- speare's purpose, with the emphatic plausibility of a scoundrel in general. In fact, an artifice of this class is a common fallacy of the logicians, who would scarcely there discern their petitio principii. The cheat, who feels his character in doubt with the purposed dupe, affects not only to assume his reputa- tion beyond question, but to treat it with the sanctity implied in making it an oath. A broken-down lord is most profuse of the " 'pon my honour". But this coincidence, merely formal, argues nothing against Iago. In him the sentiment might be / 56 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. natural, while in the others it was artificial ; and, in fact, art, in good or ill, proceeds by imitating nature. In fine, the various other characters confirm the construc- tion. The hare-brained Eoderigo objects his reputation, when Iago affects to decry the thing rhetorically. Even Othello, for the purpose of reprehending Cassio on account of the brawl that had cost him his place, refers, not either to this loss or the breach of public duty, but to " the unlacing his reputa- tion." The African had learned the Italian point of honour. In fine, Cassio himself is made to wail like a child, not for the pay or the position he lost by the mishap, but solely for "repu- tation, reputation, reputation ; " adding, " Oh, I have lost the immortal part of myself ! " This lamentation, so singular in a soldier and a man of talent, has been hitherto, like most the rest, without a semblance of explanation. Nor does this family criterion escape the poet in even its politics. Brabantio, a law-maker and member of the government, is made, on learn- ing the elopement of his daughter with the Moor, not to appeal to the law, but to " call up his kindred," and lead them in pur- suit to avenge or right himself. The play of Eomeo and Juliet hinges wholly on the principle. Iago prays heaven " to defend from jealousy the souls of all his tribe.'''' So that Shakespeare was fully conscious of that national esprit de tribu, to which Napoleon charged the failure of his efforts for Italian unity. Iago, then, is fully an expression of the race in both the basis and the spirit of its positive morality. Does he con- form, also, to the negative condition, of excluding the criteria of Conscience and of Consequence 1 As to the latter principle, he shows not the least sense of it. This absence is his cool- ness as well as callousness and daring. He wriggles himself IAGO. 57 on from one atrocity to another, without seeming to ever pause to look before him or behind. He is all in the present, and in this -way self-possessed. It is the secret of the firmness of nerve of the race, and their dexterity at the dagger and other forms of lurking peril. Hence it is, that -while entailing the most inhuman cruelties, he does not leave the impres- sion of being cruel or inhuman. There is a giddiness in his demeanour that seems to half annul the guilt. He commits crime with the bustling briskness of an ordinary business. He is constantly in plain peril of being detected and ruined, yet he never gives a thought to providing for the contingency. Thus, regardless of the consequences that involve his own life, how should he have been found attentive to those affecting only others ? His range of mind enables him to weigh the crimes but severally, or even by mere fractions of the acts that compose them ; and his morality compounds with the commission in the same detail, under pressure of the urgency and palliation of the end. The conformity may seem more doubtful as to the absence of " conscience." Iago once mentions, and with emphasis, this principle. He is vaunting to Othello his yearning to avenge him, by murdering Brabantio for his conduct to the Moor. On this intention, he remarks, that " though he has slain men in battle, yet he holds it to be very stuff o' the conscience, to do no contrived murder." The critics all conceive this passage a profession of conscience ; under- standing it, at worst, as hypocritical in Iago. Some expound it by the locution, " a matter of conscience." Others by their silence either say they see no doubt, or give assent to Dr. Johnson, who has pronounced in form. The "rough 58 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. moralist," interprets it, the " substance or essence ;" and, to enhance the emphasis, apprizes the unlearned, that " stuff " is a word of fathomless importance in the Gothic idioms. Thus, according to this writer, Iago would have said, that he held it not merely simply a " matter of conscience," hut its substance, its very essence, in the superlative degree, its stuff, " to do no contrived murder." If this be so, it is con- fessed, despite the foregoing mass of evidence, that Iago is no type of the Romano-Italic race ; even though it should be granted, the profession was hypocritical : for hypocrisy is no less alien to the true character than "conscience." Shakespeare's touches of this nature are addressed to his English audience. But the construction is, on the contrary, a downright contresens. The language of Iago is analyzed as follows : — I am a soldier ; I have slain men on the honourable field of battle. I comprehend, then, the detestation of a soldier for assassination. But, for all this, to push the scruple to the exclusion of all murder, I hold to be no better than the cant or humbug about conscience. Accordingly, though I some- times lack iniquity to serve myself, I hardly can forbear from avenging your cause. — Now here it seems the tables are fully turned upon the critics. What seemed a threat to the theory is, on the contrary, a triumph. Iago, so far from pleading conscience even feignedly, speaks his national disdain for this inner light of the northern neighbours ; for — That dark -Ian thorn of the spirit, Which none see by but those who bear it, as the thing has been defined by a philosopher and wit, who, in these qualities, is second but to Shakespeare among poets. IAGO. 59 It was resolved to keep these pages pure of critical contention, after indicating at the outset the general calibre of Shakes- peare's commentators : to continue the exposure were unfair as well as endless, seeing their notion of the poet was funda- mentally erroneous. Yet to refrain from expressing wonder in an instance so perverse and so important as to alter the whole character, is not easy. A slight attention to the dialectic drift for a few lines must have been sufficient to rectify or to prevent the over- sight. Thus Iago goes on to say, that " nine or ten times" he had thought to do this " contrived murder," or, in his own phrase, " to have yerked him here under the ribs." ISTow, this intention, this " contrivance," should have been seen to tally ill with pleading conscience the moment previous as an inviolable barrier • while, on the other hand, it comports per- fectly with one who, on the contrary, had just set conscience at defiance, as less an " essence" than a nonsense. So should also the declaration that he " lacks iniquity sometimes" — that is to say, exceptionally, and even then but to serve himself. But furthermore, the speaker at the close repeats the effort, " that, with the little godliness I have, I did forbear him." Here would be the aggravation of a direct contradiction. Iago would have opened with declaring that his conscience was essentially opposed to the commission of a certain act, and would have closed, however, with complaining of his want of godliness to forbear it ! On the other hand, according to the new interpretation, the " little godliness" will but confirm, and indeed repeat, the " stuff o' the conscience." Besides, Iago professes godliness, and not conscience, much or little. Otherwise he might have said, "with the little conscience 60 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. (which) I have," the pronoun satisfying the metre, and even serving the grammar. But the choice between the terms seals the character, moreover, positively. God, the spiritual father, the supreme family authority, is to the all-exterior religion and morals of the Italian what conscience is to the all-interior religion of the Teuton. In men too humbly unaware of this distinction of their race, and never doubting that all the world were not equally endowed, the blunder about conscience might be readily con- ceived. But how it is that in the grammar (which has just been alluded to), the form, nay the matter of the phrase did not jog the critics ; how it escaped the practised eye of the great lexicographer, the lawgiver of the language, may be puzzling to many. The fact, however, is but too plain. If the word "stuff" were meant respectfully, the article must be affixed ; and for the measure, " quite" or "just" might be employed instead of " very." Thus, " to be just the stuff of the conscience," would exclude contemptuous import, and be a peremptory and more elegant expression of the sense pre- tended. But to be " very stuff o' the conscience" says the contrary no less decisively. It is actually the form of the cant expression of contempt. To say that a thing is "stuff," or more emphatically, " very stuff," denotes it to be brute matter wholly formless and meaningless ; 1 whereas the phrase, " the stuff," or " the very stuff," or " just the stuff," distin- 1 This import is intensified into positive noxiousness, in a line of the play of Macbeth, which yet the critics have the naive confidence to cite as parallel to their construction of Iago's " stuff", as substance or essence ! Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff. Pray what is it here the substance or essence of? IAGO. 61 guishes the real stuff among the pretended, and thus endows it with a species, a form, an essence. Eut this was not the sentiment of Shakespeare. And to give emphasis to his meaning, and perhaps notice to the obtuse, he mutilates the preposition to leave an aspect of vulgarity. He goes still farther, and gives the definite article to " conscience," to the contrary of its omission in the case of " stuff." This cross particular, which scarce could happen by inaccuracy or neglect, would of itself suffice to vindicate the new interpretation. The Enghsh idiom speaks of " conscience" without the article, and would have said, the stuff or essence of conscience ; when, therefore, it is made to speak of " stuff of the conscience," the meaning must be, that stuff called conscience, about which there is so much cant. And so the expression, too, is exact to the character assigned Iago. How is it possible, be it repeated, that generations of men of culture have missed these cumulative physical notices, not to press for the dialectical ? That the explorers, who have settled to a fraction the poet's accounts, with the bell-ringing expenses at the burial of his sister, should have failed to read correctly a passage in his works of such importance as to have passed into an aphorism in the language 1 Perhaps a funda- mental cause was their impression, as proved already, that Shakespeare was a writer too ill educated or too careless, to expect in him much nicety of language or of detail. It is partly to disuse this too convenient rule of criticism, and show genius to be a law to itself in even expression, that the argument has been allowed, in this or future junctures, to descend to the minuteness of verbal discussion. Then, as to the subject of this oversight, the pious Johnson — as predis- 62 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. posed to find a conscience on the slightest intimation, as Uncle Toby to see a counterscarp in every tumulus or hillock — the worthy doctor was among the earliest to advert to any difficulty ; and, after him, what English writer would question particles or conscience ? But there is also, it should he owned, in the construction of the passage, some degree of both grammatical and logical confusion, which might contribute to mislead a mind unaided by a guiding system, but which, however, lends a crowning confirmation to the theory. For Iago, to be a type of the Eomano-Italic race, must be as desti- tute of ratiocinative regularity as of conscience. In fine, Iago not merely acts this destitution of the latter sentiment, but even expresses and explains it in formal refer- ence to his country. Alluding again to conscience in the same derisive tone, he defines it to be, in his countrywomen, " not to leave undone, but to keep unknown." Precisely and profoundly so. To mind but the reputation, to regard only the external, of which alone, as now evinced, the race possesses a vivid consciousness. The test of Manners, the next in order, would, as offered in Iago and known familiarly of the Italians, flow directly from this moral nature. The application may be then re- stricted to a leading indication. There is no feature of Italian manners more peculiar or important than their faculty of secrecy, the key to which is now discovered. It is seen to be a compound and necessary consequence of the exclusive vigilance or vergency to the exterior, and the absence of original impulsion in the interior. The pressure all is from without inwards, none or little from within outwards. Thus the tendency of the Italian is to retain darkly what is im- IAGO. 63 parted to him. The tendency of the Teuton, in this as all tilings, is the contrary ; in him the pressure is from within, and scarcely any from "without. He must give, not quite his secrets, but his "sentiments," to the world, without waiting to be asked, or much considering what may he thought of them. He must turn himself inside out, like the finger of a glove ; not from frankness, hut necessity, and perhaps, also, to shape a cavity whereby to entrap things exterior into himself, on the other side ; in plainer terms, that his preaching is the inverse of his practice. With the Italian it is a penance to unbosom himself to a priest ; with the Teuton it is a privilege to unbosom himself to the public. The former is a cistern that retains silently what is put into it, the latter is a spring for ever gurgling and running over. You can put nothing into the Teuton against this current of his subjectivity ; it would be bke attempting to staunch a weir on the wrong side : demonstration sinks no deeper than the water he throws out, and here in quality, not of conviction, but of compromise or commerce. The Italian may be moulded to a soldier or a monk, a hero or a histrio, a freeman or a slave, according to the world, to the medium around him ; and so dark is he in all that all seem equally congenial. You could not know his heart, as Iago tells Othello, " if it were in your hand." Shakespeare fails not to make Iago farther manifest this signal feature, and by the double demonstration of profes- sion and of practice. For when, says this Italian type, in speaking to Eoderigo — For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In complement extern, 'tis not long after 64 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at ; / am not what I am. Act i. sc. 1. The resume is a motto for the Italian race, but understanding it as an organical, not hypocritical, duplicity. And here, again, of course the contrary applies to the Teutonic, which might say with equal strictness, i" am what I am not ; for the compromise lasts no longer than the circumstances that enforced it. The party would he as much deceived who took the Teuton by his preaching, as one who should confide in the placidity of the Italian. This impenetrable mask is displayed practically by Iago when exposed amid the multitude of horrors he had wrought. He declares he will thenceforth never utter a syllable ; and his silence defies all goading, whether physical or moral. The defence and determination must be consummative of the proof, as showing how carefully the great poet makes " the ruling passion strong in death" The Social proof of the identity of Iago with his race has been anticipated by the moral in a measure sufficient for the occasion This apparent dislocation is a logical congruity. The sociability of the Italians lags in ethics and even religion It does not rise above the kindred to take in even the body politic, and so, still less the body human, or the social by excellence. Nothing, therefore, of this compass could be offered by Iago, whose family stage of the social spirit was embraced consequently by morality. It is this absence that looks like selfishness, in the type as in the race. The Italians are the least humanitarian of polished nations. They only laughed at and trafficked in the enthusiasm of the Celts, which drew the Teutons themselves into the frenzies of the Crusades : IAGO. 65 that wild but noble inspiration which sought to vindicate, in the East, the divine symbol of the humanity which was trampled on in the West. They would at this day immerge Europe in the depths of the Atlantic, in exchange for even a chance of attain- ing " Italian unity" ; but it would be from a love of country, not a hatred of mankind. What profundity in the distinction of this family selfishness of Iago, from the individual selfish- ness which takes the shape of avarice ! And yet the deepest of Shakespeare's instincts, if not his purposes, remains behind. How has he come, against the apothegms and instances of all experience, to give a character like Iago the profession of a soldier. Pope has sung, and sung with truth — Tom struts a soldier, open, bold, and brave : Will sneaks a scrivener, an exceeding knave. Why did not Shakespeare then make Iago a scrivener, not a soldier ? In part, no doubt, because he found it so ordained by "the mythic story. But he must also be supposed to have seen reason for the anomaly, and one dramatically paramount to ordinary probabilities. These probabilities are well noted in Pope's characters of calling. But myths are formed on deeper characters, and thus divergent from the common. They are gathered round obstructions, and not in the open current. Like deltas, they result from a cross current of greater force. The overruling "ocean-stream" was here the law of race. And Shakespeare, therefore, with the myth, made the anomaly of profession foil supremely, in Iago, his real hero, the Italic race. D 2 CHAPTEE II. HAMLET. AS TYPE OF THE TEUTONIC " RACE. 1. This masterpiece of Shakespeare as a portrait, not a play, has been already claimed as an ideal of the Gothic race ; and the likeness is attested by the native admiration. The English poet must have best painted what he had studied most ; the English public must, through sympathy, have most admired its own resemblance. But German critics, who were first perhaps to speculate on the relation, should not have kept to the fair side, and sought to hide the blind profile. It was especially an outrage on the author criticised, whom they proportionably crowned with flowers for what they caricatured in fact. They lauded Shakespeare in pro- portion (and perhaps also in compensation) as they eluded or disguised the harsh fidelity of his- portraiture. But English writers will never hesitate between such puerile pre- possessions, and the complete illustration of the genius of their national poet. Beside, the bias would be repugnant to the purpose of this enquiry, which proposes to identify the true Hamlet described by Shakespeare with the race called the Teutonic as shaped by nature and shewn by history. HAMLET. G7 The leading marks of this powerful race will be admitted to be these. la the highest or mental order, the faculty of Reflection as distinguished from the passive receptivity of the senses. In morality, the test of Conscience as against reli- gious tradition. In politics, the strife of Liberty in opposi- tion to authority, and of the interests of the person against the interests of the public. In philosophy, Metaphysics, as con- trasted with scholastics, or, in the native phrase, the subjec- tive in preference to the objective. In fine, in body, the Muscularity befitting this complex struggle, and in manners a correlative degree of roughness and insensibility. In all things an organical introversion upon Self, in opposition to the Eoman race, whose gaze was outward upon nature. On the other hand, and corresponding to these invaluable qualities, there is a drawback of defects or of excesses thence resulting. In reflection, which seeks the differences, the negations, the particulars, the excess is a disorderly and blind empiricism, or the mere visions of the mind itself when it endeavours to produce some order ; the defect is a debility of ratiocinative combination. The test of conscience has a like tendency to dissolution of moral rule, since everybody should respect but his own monitor, and for the moment : hence the ludicrous profession, that each conscience must be right, and at the same time that all are right, on the* same principle, though all be different ; hence, in conduct, a licentiousness of censure and invective which this monitor commissions against all things that do not suit it, and a vagueness of resolution, for want of principles fixed exteriorly, while the difficulty is contemplated, and till obtruded physically. The excess incident to liberty is too disputed to be made a 68 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. test. The foible of metaphysics is a sickly psychicality which constitutes the universe upon its human apex, and then ex- plores it, & rehours, with a microscopical minutenes that tends to the destruction of all coherence in thought itself. The muscularity and bluntness sink to brow-heating and brutality, and the concentrated personality into an all-engrossing selfish- ness. These various properties, good and evil, consort like sections of the same sphere, and therefore need no nice detach- ment, as they answer for each other mutually. The thesis is, that they supply the true and full interpretation of the character of Hamlet and the composition of Shakespeare. 2. The character is early outlined in the chiding of the uncle, a man of ' ' witchcraft in his wit," and all the means of observation, and before either could be influenced by sus- picion or simulation, King. . . . But to persevere In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness ; 'tis unmanly grief: It shews a will most incorrect to heaven; A heart unfortified or mind impatient ; An uuderstanding simple and unschooled: For what we know must be and is as common As any tbe most vulgar thing to sense, Why should we, in our peevish opposition, Take it to heart ? Fye ! 'tis a fault to heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd. Act i. sc. 2. The traits denoted by italics consort strictly with the programme. The obstinacy indicates a limited intelligence, and is accordingly habitual to old age and adolescence. Muscu- HAMLET. 69 larity is the concomitant, when not the cause, of " impious stubbornness," as is attested by the niyth of the Titan war- fare against heaven ; and self-indulgence, in even grief, resembles woman in her weakness. The wailing of Achilles on the death of Patroclus, with other features of his conduct, illustrates typically all these qualities ; for he is known to be a type of the muscular or warrior character. Accordingly Horatio is the Patroclus of Hamlet, and for the same reason of a contrast in the characters. So that the hero of the play reveals himself, by this rule of contraries, in the encomiums which his conscious weakness bestows enviously upon the friend : Ham For thou Last been As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing : j A man that fortune's buffets and rewards Has ta'en with equal thanks : and blest are those "WLose blood and judgment are so well co-mingled, TLat tLey are not a pipe for Fortune's finger To sound what stop she please. Give me the man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, &c. Act iii. sc. 2. Just so, for then that heart would feel supplied in its defects. And so of the other commendations — the judg- ment, fortitude, self-control, and resignation to the course of nature — towards their opposite infirmities. Achilles, in a moment of meditation, or rather moodiness — for in such natures it is moodiness alone that ever meditates ; it is the precise contrast of reflection with reason, the" self-recoil of a being of passion and muscularity, reduced to impotence — Achilles, in his tent, and abandoned by the Myrmidons, would have been made by Homer to treat Patroclus in the same strain. Proceeding with the uncle's portraiture, the "will most 70 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. incorrect to heaven," meaning to dogmatic religion, imports the religion of conscience. The lack of fortitude and mental patience follows also from this fickle prompter, which makes, says Hamlet, all men cowards, and gives to thought the hue of sickness. The " understanding simple and unschooled " is as conformable. It means devoid of ratiocinative aptitude and organization — for a scholar he knew Hamlet to be in acquisition ; a want of recognition of the rights of others and the laws of nature, which defect is of the essence of one engrossed with himself alone : for such a character (as Shakespeare so emphatically signalizes it) is blind to " even the most vulgar truth of sense " that contravenes it ; and excusably, its only rule of judgment being itself. Then the " peevish opposition " is an offshoot of the same stock : the wholesale, vehement, and acrid railing of Hamlet, is the fruit, as is the cross-grained and reformatory querulousness of the race. Useful also, for in this world the constant fault-finder must tell much truth ; and, in fact, socially, the analytic function of this race. The dereliction, in fine, to heaven, to nature, and to reason, depicts the absence of the reasoning powers or the predominance of the reflective, of which the object, as the inspiration, is the ego and its interests. The illustration may now advance into the details of this outline, as filled up throughout the play, by the same master- hand that limned it ; confronting severally the criteria, and commencing with the mental member. 3. But here arises a previous question as to the madness of Hamlet : for to conclude of the native reasoning power of one who played the madman, would not augur very fairly for 71 the reason of the critic. The question, perhaps, cannot he, that Shakespeare meant the scenes for madness. The fact would seem that he accepted the notion passively at third hand, from a French abstract 1 (in English version) of the old chronicle of Saxo, which was itself, no doubt, a popular con- struction of the real facts. Noav, such conjectural construction is what is meant by the word insanity, doAvn to even the present day of civilization and of science : a mere opinion or even name made to account for certain actions that vary strangely from the manners of the maker, or of his age. In short, it is a mere negation, as the word shows — a mask for ignorance. It is precisely the definition of Polonius in the case, and which the poet perhaps ridicules in the person of the definer : — Mad call I it ; for to define true madness, "What is 't but to be nothing else but mad. In ruder times this easy cutting of the knot of conduct is of course frequent ; it is the source of the legendary element of history. An instance quite in point is the feigned folly of the elder Brutus. Being understood to have, like Hamlet? long resided at the tyrant's court, it was inferred, in both the cases, from the results of the residence, that the dread culprits could not possibly have left the enemy so near to watch them, unless the project had been masked by the assumption of imbecility. For the simple understanding, and too often, the refined, reflect instinctively their own knowledge of marked events, in good or evil, back upon the parties interested in effecting or eluding them. This ex post facto fallacy is the foible of Reflection, and the fountain of the wisdom of teleo- 1 Belleforest's Collection of Novels. 72 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. logy or filial causes. Add to which, the love of contrast and the naive popular self-vindication, which combine shrewd- ness with imbecility, and of which each village, perhaps, has a myth. In fine, if any eccentricities have been recorded of the great avenger, they are magnified by fabulist, poet, histo- rian, through after ages. But philosophy comes at last to supplant popidar hypothesis, by resolution of the incoherences of conduct that suggested it, into a normal source in nature, as in this instance the law of race. For in effect the things which Shakespeare assigns to Hamlet, in guise of folly, are far exceeded in the common manners of the race he typifies, at even this day. It may be doubted, then, if the poet, who was as profound a philosopher as genius yields unaided, did not surmise the situation. Did he not reproduce the incident of Hamlet's so-called madness as a lineament of character, not as a scheme of conduct ? The least equivocal criterion must be the use to which he puts it. If he viewed it as a project shaped by Hamlet for the alleged purpose, he must have made it the very mainspring of the action of the piece. At the worst, it must be found to serve some end in the economy. For to suppose it introduced with a conjunction of the two quali- ties of being both useless to the action and foreign to the character, were to pronounce the great dramatist himself a madman or an imbecile. And this in fact is what the critics to this day are forced to dare. For the most classic of his commentators, such as Johnson and Malone, hold the mad scenes not merely useless but prejudicial to the action ! The latter frankly says that Shakespeare " has fallen into an absurdity ;" but patriotically finds excuse for him in " close HAMLET. 73 adhesion to the old chronicle." So that not only is the great poet, but the myth also, it seems, absurd ! And for what ? For the inefhcacy or unfitness of a means to a destination repeated passively by Shakespeare, and first devised as just explained. Instead of braving the real absurdity of making this double charge, there was, consequently, the alternative of questioning the destination, "Was, it should be asked, the fact of any purpose not an afterthought, according to the common fallacy of turning results into causes ; and then, in turn, the fact of madness, was it not a like inference from the appearance of incongruity between the conduct and the character ? In both these cases, now established, the inutility of the insanity to the economy of the action can impeach nor poet nor myth ; the whole absurdity recoils upon the card-house of the critics. On the other hand, the scenes which are conventionally called insane become of the most pointed import when considered as suggested ; that is to say, not as feigned by Hamlet, and therefore foreign to the cha- racter, but on the contrary, as fully normal and profoundly characteristic. And thus would Shakespeare — with whom the character was all things, the action little- — have used the incidents that served his purpose with their traditional out- side, without adverting that this imported a view at variance with his own. Thus the epic of the great Dante, and even the pictures of Michael Angelo, abound with such apparent incongruities of tradition, which the critics think absurdity, irregularity, anachronism, for the want of seeing the principle of history in art. It is but equitable, therefore, to the critics of Shakespeare to allow, in the above temerities, for their ignorance of his E 74 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. principle. They doubtless felt, however vaguely, that his forte lay in the characters. But what the character meant with them was Macbeth's " man of the catalogue." This is clear from Malone's own exposition in the premises — " Had Hamlet," says he, "gone naturally to work, as ive could suppose such a prince to do in parallel circumstances, there would have been an end of our play. The poet, therefore, was obliged to delay his hero's revenge. But then he should have contrived some good reason for it." — And it is thus that the works of Shakespeare are interpreted to this hour ! Why, the delay of the revenge, so far from needing a better reason, is itself the rationale of the character of Hamlet, and to unfold that rationale is the business of the play. To devise, to this effect, a plan of artificial conduct, must be, therefore, not merely futile, but preposterous, absurd ; it would be forging a reason against the reason of the play ; it would be notifying the audience not to understand the character as it is represented, since they must take the man for mad. Besides, the essence of the character itself to be unfolded, is incapacity to form or to follow any project. So worse than gratuitous were- the madness for such end ; whereas the vagaries so named belong essentially to the character. But it is mani- fest this character is not the Hamlet of the critics, who is made to " work " right " naturally," meaning by the old routine ; or as they fairly explain the naturalness, in accordance with their own conception. It was certainly, then, natural that they should find absurdity, and mystery, and madness, in the Hamlet of Shakespeare. For this personage really was, and indeed could have been, no individual ; but an embodiment of the abstracted idiosyncrasies of a race. HAMLET. 75 3. Of these, the category first in order to he elucidated is Reflection, which is now guarded against confusion hy the foregoing explanations. The result leaves the normal faculty, with its weak side of irrationality, to shed at once a flood of light on both the character and play of Hamlet. For Shakespeare, improving on the Horatian precept, identifies his. mode of composition with the character ; is more a preacher than a dramatist, more a critic than a constructor ; an analyzer of all things, an organizer of nothing. Both the foibles are too familiar in the part of Hamlet to require detail. Nothing is more pitiful or puerile than Iris resolves to give coherence to a conduct that falls forthwith into contradiction. Quite at the outset, he precipitates the ghost to end its narrative, and let him fly to vengeance, with the velocity of thought ; and then, the account ended, he not only stays the flight, but thinks it requisite to take out his carnet 1 or note-book, and register the treachery of the destined victim, lest he forget it. But this provided, does he go to work 1 JSTo, he tells us he will go " to pray," and then bemoans that he was born to reset the times in "joint." And so throughout his course, which is a chaos of such puerilities — puerilities of action, but profundities of character. It is accordingly to tins effect that Shakespeare uses the so-called madness. The abdication of common sense is the means supplied by Hamlet's reason for prosecution of an opportunity never lacked, but less desired. And this inimitable combination of procrastinative vaguenesses is still refined by the liability of the quaint desire 1 Those who have ever been in Paris will remember as its noisiest nuisance the hawkers of the everlasting " Garnets Anglais." This national "mark" of the commodity is a curious comment on the text. 76 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. to work quite counter : for the insanity would be precisely what must exclude from opportunity, or leave the idiot, if suspected, at the mercy of the enemy. It would be therefore an ostrich reasoning to hide his head in the hole of folly. But what dissembles to him the blind side, is the duplicity of his own feelings, the affectation of being pursuing, while he is conscious of shunning, action. 1 For a person who is strain- ing to impose upon others, exposes himself in the opposite direction ; and, with equal understanding, a simple and upright man is more difficult to circumvent than the wiliest of schemers. Thus, while Hamlet is pre-occupied with passing, on the spectators, a mere pretext for his evasion, as being a plan against the uncle, he is made, not to observe that this plan was of a nature to be turned, whether credited or not, against the purpose. In fine, he also is made to break off his sole attempt at formal argument by the express avowal that he " cannot reason.'''' But in proportion as he cannot reason and then act, he reflects and rails. It is not only to his mother that he " speaks daggers " without using any. Indeed, his spleen is not more vehemently vented against the tyrant than against all things in nature, not only animate, but even inanimate. " All the uses of this world are flat, stale, and unprofitable"; the " atmosphere is a congregation of foul and pestilent vapours" ; 1 This has been exceedingly well observed by Schlegel, who honestly remarks of Hamlet : — " He has a natural inclination for crooked ways ; is a hypocrite towards himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his want of determination ; thoughts, as he says on a different occasion, which have but one part wisdom And three parts coward." — Lect. Dram. Lit. 77 the " earth is a sterile promontory " ; even the country of his nativity is " no better than a prison"; man is a " quintessence of dust"; nay, he himself is "an arrant knave," "a rogue and a slave." And as he here is in soliloquy, and so to be thought sincere, he may be trusted for some traits of self- description to the purpose. As, for instance, when he calls himself " a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of his cause." This quaint image has all the picturesque profundity of Shakespeare, who has allusion to conception, which in things mental belongs to reason. But the following is more pointed to the railing mood in question : Why, what an ass am I ? This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murdered, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a cursing, like a very drab, A scullion . . . About my brains. Act ii. sc. 2. And the result of this muscular mandate to the brains is the device to set some strolling-players to trick his uncle's conscience into proof of a guilt he has been striving long to punish. Castigat auditque. 4. This allusion to the Conscience introduces the moral test. The word is found repeatedly upon the lips of Hamlet, while he pays no real regard to the religious or Italian ethics. Thus in the scene referred to, though the guilt of the usurper had been vouched by preternatural as well as rational assur- ance, yet he considers the authority of conscience as so paramount, that he can seize it as a pretext (for it is no more) of procrastination. "When he brutally puts to death the 78 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. "blameless escorts of his English voyage, he deems it ample exculpation to say " they were not near his conscience. 1 ' Not merely does this sovereign arbiter make brave men cowards and cowards brave, hut " there is nothing either good or had," says Hamlet, "hut thinking makes it so ;." for hy thinking is here meant deeming, feeling — conscience, in the mental aspect. The position, it is seen, is a profession, in set form, of all the ahsurd consequences above indicated in this sentiment. No others indeed could he drawn from it. Con- science is at "best hut a test, not a truth ; it can prove or affirm nothing, it merely warns or negatives ; and from a negative it is a rule of even school-boy logic, that nothing is deducible, unless, indeed, absurdities. Conscience, then, in this view is the opposite of religion. This normal opposition, as laid doAvu among the tests, may he exemplified conspicu- ously in the famous solilotpiy. Here, where conscience is exalted to the utmost of its potency, it really is exclusive of objective religion. The phrase " to he or not to he," refers to this life, not a future ; and when Hamlet speaks con- tingently elsewhere of the latter, his only apprehension is from disagreeable " dreaming." And that this term is employed not in a figurative sense, is confirmed by another passage still upon the point, where he says that he " could be bounded within a nutshell and yet reign through infinite space, were it not that he has bad dreams." The metaphysics of the capability are not more national than the malady, which is the cause of the eneiromancy of the warrior races of all times. Dream interpreters formed the cabinet of the Assyrian monarchs. With the Hellens they were rife among the Thebans and the Spartans. In the historic plays of Shakespeare, Avhere the HAMLET. 70 characters are Norman, dreams compose, it may be noted, a principal machinery. But to return to the strange absence of formal religion in the soliloquy — strange to those who take the notion of Dr. Johnson on the subject — the master art of Shakespeare is more signal at the close. "When Hamlet is interrupted by the encoun- ter of Ophelia reading, he immediately exclaims : " Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered." Thus, it seems that he is brought to remember them himself, and with them the religion to whose language they belong, but on being wakened to the outer world, like them, foreign to his selfish being. And when this only vital creed of his does not efface entirely, it scarce alludes to, the creed of doctrine but to subserve it to the deeper instincts. Thus, in the very passage cited, the prayer, the sin, and even the lover, on recurring to him, are put by Hamlet, from simple impulse, to his own service. In one of his pretended meditations of suicide, he also recollects, with a remarkable opportuneness, that " the Everlasting has fixed his canon against self- slaughter." So when the pretext of entrapping the tyrant's conscience seemed too flimsy, he remembers that the ghost may have deceived him to get him "damned" — the ghost of his " dear father, " too, be it noted When he is stripped of all his timorous pretences for delay, by coming on his victim quite defenceless and at prayer, he thinks of heaven, and will not strike, for fear of sending there the pious murderer. And when his rancour — another offshoot of the conscience — is to be gratified, he makes provision, in the execution of the companions of his voyage, to preclude them from " shriving," by quite a refined reminiscence. Thus the ceremonial religion 80 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. is never forgotten when he has to do with other people, and may use it for his vengeance, his vacillation, in short, his selfishness. But when communing with himself alone, the Eoman Catholic hecomes Protestant ; and this, hy not a day's anachronism in the poet. It is presumed that the conformity of this feature of Hamlet to the ethical distinction of the Teutonic race, must he too evident to thoughtful readers to need ungracious illustration. Still, although the facts he evident, the mode -of viewing them is unimagined, and it seems requisite to point the theory hy a few local indications. In the first place, most the treatises on ethics in the English language, are treatises on conscience, very many of them in even the title ; and then they also exceed in number, not merely those of any other, hut, perhaps, those of all the other European languages together. In the third place, it may he added, that they were written hy men among the ablest of Saxon origin that the country has produced. A few of the leading may he cited, with the titles of the works. There was then, as early as 1602, Perkins, " On the whole Treatment of Cases of Conscience." Taylor, in 1643, " On Conscience, with the power and the cases thereof." The following are remem- hered as succeeding at various intervals : Hall, " On Cases of Conscience " Sanderson, " Cases of Conscience ;" Jeremy Taylor, " The Eule of Conscience ;" even Hohbes himself did hut push the same conscience to its extreme consequence of self-suhversion. That might is right and conscience fear of that might, was a legitimate corollary of this personal test of morals ; and it was doubtless the reductio ad absurdum of their principle that stung the English theologians to give this M author an undue consequence. By the fact of its exhaustion, he, however, became turning-point to other modes and titles in the treatment of conscience ; such as the Moral faculty, the Moral sense, etc. But what is perhaps most remarkable is, that Bishop Wilkina made this gentilitial oracle the head key or " figure," in his celebrated scheme of a universal language. It may be further averred that the English have the honour not alone of exceeding in, but of originating, such compositions ; l excepting always, of course, the great fact of the Beformation, which had been the Magna Charta of these personal rights in morals. It is singular that Dr. Whewell should have suggested an origin not only so preposterous, but also odious, as the Romish casuistry. The Cases of conscience were quite the normal contrary. The casuistry was governed alone by the Canon laAY. 2 The conscience became, in opposi- 1 Long before the earliest of the theologians named, the Conscience was a favourite topic of the English stage. In 1581 there is registered a play called " The Conflict of Conscience." And about the same date, a piece with a title significant of long and popular familiarity, namely, " Eobin Conscience." — Collier's Hist, of Stage, vol. ii. It was probably a staple of the " Moralities" in England. 2 Understanding, however, the orthodox casuistry. The Jesuit abuse of it, if meant by Mr. Whewell, does exactly correspond with the morality of conscience. This contrast is the barb, indeed, of the sarcastic title which Pascal gives those Fathers, of les Nouveatjx Casuistes. Only that the Conscience with the Jesuits was the object, whereas with the Teutons it was the inspiration; the one formed themselves to it, the others,/rom it : and to this difference is owing the curious oversight of the identity. It is well-known that the chief occasion of the creation of the Jesuits was to counteract the principle of " private judgment," that is Con- science, introduced by the Beformation and so subversive of church authority. It was in the endeavour to accomplish this that they adopted 82 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. tion, its own law ; that is to say, the absolute negative of any. Yet Dr. Whewell, our latest moralist, repeats this national criterion. In Ms history, as in his system of moral philo- sophy, he adopts the clualistic division, which is gentilitial. The two terms he denominates, dependent and independent, with an aptitude of language not unusual to the writer, but which often compromises when the subject is equivocal. Thus the "independent" morals are those of conscience as now explained ; but the orthodox divine could have hardly been aware, that he was justifying the religious revolt of the Inde- pendents. This, however, is the real efficient cause and ample warrant of the whole progressive hierarchy of national negation — from the remonstrance of pro, through dis and in, to the roar of non. The morality of " dependence" is the religious and Eoman, though expounded by the author as the principle of common interest. Tor common interest is pre- cisely the moral principle of the family, and even Bentham did but extend it from the Eoman to the Human. It has those " maxims," made so famous by Pascal, of mental reservation, directing the intention, in short, d'attirer tout le monde et de ne rehuter personne. For most of those maxims follow logically from the received principle, that the morality of action depends on the intention. The Jesuits did but use against the Protestants their own weapon, to keep the public to the Church at least in form, if not morals. And Pascal would have really been, as charged to him, disingenuous, if he too had not been ignorant of this position of the Jesuits. He makes his naive Father adduce Sanchez and Filiutius to prove " que c' 'est V intention qui regie la qualite de V action." This he rightly makes the root of all their abominations ; but he failed to recognise that it was also the new morality which the Jesuits endeavoured, not to maintain, but to manage. What must be, then, conceived of the professors of this morality who shew so rapturous a relish for the Provincial Letters. 83 merely been detruncated of its Papal or paternal capital, and lost the index of its order, in the contention with the adverse principle. Beyond this principle, which is Conscience or individual interest, the author has no notion of a progress in morality. Yet it seems clear, from the tenor and suggestions of the foregoing pages, that the result of the strife of these Two Principles in ethics is to he a third degree, which alone constitutes the true morality. Not, however, by supplanting either of the others, as they have been endeavouring to do by one another ; but simply by reducing both to order and recon- ciling them ; by barring the Eoman principle from rolling for- ward on the present the weight, in large part dead, of the humanity of the past, and by limiting the Teuton from throwing off wholly this authority, and recommencing in the personal independence of the savage state. That this extreme should be in principle adhered to by Mr. Whewell, a man reputed to be first of living English plnlosophers, must be, assuredly, in Ms favourite formulas, a prerogative instance, or experimentum cruris of its gentditial character. But Dr. Whewell is a sort of dualism in himself ; he is a man of science as well as a theologian. He therefore has some gleams of this morality of the third order. But the result is a constant paralogism throughout his work. Thus at the outset, 1 in defining his " independent" ethics (that is to say, defining the differentia in logic), he lays down as criterion, not the motive, which is his true one, but slips in reason, which is the principle distinctive of the third morality. And then he goes on to personify, paronymously, the expression, or to abase the process to the metaphysical view of an entity, 1 History of Moral Philosophy in England. Introduction, p. is. 84 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. and says the reason " sees," " dictates," etc., throughout the hook ; all evidently to avoid the compromising term con- science. A writer labouring to yoke the two characters referred to, claims, however, from the candid much logical indulgence. And so the Doctor may he thankfully dismissed with the following extract, whose pungent truth is merely draped with the detour of the tense historical : — "The Englishman who turned his thoughts towards morals was willing to take the dignity and complacency, hut not the labour and risk of philosophizing ; willing to reason, but not willing to confine himself to precise ideas, so that his reasonings should be conclusive ; willing to reason in favour of virtue, but not willing to iveigh the reasons of her adver- saries. Thbough all his pretences at theorizing, he was IN FACT GUIDED BY HIS PRACTICAL UNDERSTANDING. He handled for a little while the ancient gordian knots of metaphysical con- troversy, and then cut them across with the hard and sharp weapon which he used in daily life. If he were taxed with this inconsistency, he would perhaps reply, that to tie and untie what was so weak a bond in practice, could be little gain. Yet he might be reminded that this process brings for its reward all the gain that man's speculative nature looks for, the preservation of a coherent and continuous thread of thought and reason through all the windings of human life and action. When the strong man's sword alone divides this complicated line [the eminent mathematician must have for- gotten that a line is simple], it presents to us nothing but detached fragments and unconnected ends, in which the rational principle sees only contradiction and absurdity, and HAMLET. 85 by which the heart, so far as its views are enlightened by the reason, is disturbed and discontented." T Nothing could be better observed or expressed, and the closing phrase alludes to the third and true morality. There remained but to unmask the term "practical understanding," which is turned, by the national consciousness, into a badge of mental eminence, from what it really is, a brand of reason- ing incapacity. To expose this on all occasions is the truest patriotism. The exposure, it is true, may not remove the defect, for it is strictly not a defect, but the function of the race ; but it would remedy the evil consequences of tran- scending this special function, by teaching how to limit it in execution and authority. However, the object here was to prove that it exists, and that in mind as in morality, it is the very character which Shakespeare has embodied to the genti- litial sympathies. In fine, the highest function in the English Government is the keeping of the Eoyal conscience. Proceed we now to trace the race in Hamlet's speculative tentatives. 5. This test of the Philsophy needs httle illustration. In Hamlet it is plainly metaphysical and negative ; Ms universal criticism and confusion are a proof. It appears, indeed, at all but in such yawnings as the following : — " There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio," etc. ; he does not say what the things are. " There is something within me that passeth shew," etc. " There is something in this more than natural, if ■philosophy could find it out." Always the vague, the negative, the subjective. But the gentilitial insight of 1 Ut supra, p. 180. 8b NEW EXEGESIS OP SHAKESPEARE. the poet appears profoundest in the musings of the hero above the labours of the grave-diggers. The sort of reflexive revelry with which he gloats upon the shattered skulls — a mood composed of morbid selfishness, and warrior instincts of destruction — reminds so strikingly of the character of German metaphysics, of which Feuerbach is but a phase, that they might seem inspired by Shakespeare. For example, Hamlet says, on still another occasion : "A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed on that worm. — What dost thou mean by this ? — Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar." Now this is literally the philosophy of the said Feuerbach, of which a fundamental axiom is, that " man is what he eats." Again, says Hamlet : " Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alex- ander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?" It is truly inconceivable how Shakespeare, in his day, has been able to divine, in such refinements of detail, the unrevering race of destruction and democracy. Is it wonderful that he should be despised by foreign critics, while he is thought to splutter these coarse puerilities without purpose 1 For in the current view of Hamlet, not merely are they senseless, but grossly out of character and nature with a man, who both is himself a prince and as yet too young in life to push misanthropy or meditation beyond the moodiness of mere humour. The logic of Hamlet's "progress" is no less characteristic; the mere material sorites distinctive of the race. The normality of this may be explained in few words. The point of view of the mind in the Eomano- Italic race being, as has been shown, exterior or in a plane with HAMLET. 87 physical nature, the reason must look backward, for its means of combination, to Man in his traditions, his history, his religion. In the antagonist race, where the point of view is man, there is a similar necessity of leaning forward upon physical Nature, to find an anchorage, a purchase, a means of mental progression, amid the fluctuating absolute-, ness of the negative intelligence. Here the reasoning to be real, must be crawlingly material, must be a mere inductive manipulation of the objects ; for if it were to quit the earth and lean upon the human pole, it must immediately lose all footing in the maelstrom of the ego. 1 This extreme, as the term intimates, is the German metaphysics ; the other is the English "practical understanding." In giving both these characters, so opposite in appearance, though identical in principle, to the intellect of Hamlet, the great dramatist again evinces that his clear conception was the race, not a class or individual, where the things are incompatible. A final feature of the philosophy of Hamlet and his race may be noted in a line which seems more cited than under- stood. It tells us that " there is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will." Tin's persuasion is very natural in those who hew the ends but roughly ; for in pro- 1 Schlegel has well observed the fact in Hamlet, though naturally without seizing the common gentilitial principle. " Hamlet," says he, " believes in his father's ghost, as long as he has sight of it; hut as soon as it disappears, it seems to him in nearly the light of a deception." And he adds, " Shakespeare intended to show that Hamlet could not fix himself in any conviction of any kind whatever." He should have said, conviction external or ratiocinative. Yet Hamlet is with Coleridge and his countrymen in general, an ideal of logical meditation. The thing, bowever, may quite well have appeared so to Coleridge. 88 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. portion as man does less, the part of nature is more con- spicuous. Thus in cities, where men must plan and provide most things themselves, and this with regularity, they are less superstitious, than in the country where subsistence is at the mercy of the elements ; the yeomanry of England are still in the stage of witchcraft. But in addition to this general or circumstantial influence, the character is special in degree to the race of Hamlet. The Teuton has, properly speaking, no ends, hut is impelled by motives ; the Italian, on the contrary, has, strictly, no motives, but is attracted by ends. Or they may otherwise be said to have the end in the motives, or the motives in the end, respectively. The con- trariety is, that the force, however named, comes in the Teuton from within; in the Italian, from without. And hence their equal pertinacity, though in a way as didy opposite. The former never quits his object, the latter never quits his impulse, and for the simplest of all reasons, that he cannot quit himself ; his avidity is more tenacious than the dropsy or the gout. The Italian is immoveable from the traditional end laid down for him ; he is fixed as to the object, which is his centre of force. The Teuton, whose centre of force is in himself, and whose motives or end is his personal satisfaction, is as necessarily persistent in obedience to tins impulse, although with no attachment to a choice among the objects. Carrying, as it were, the world of his interests within himself, and caring for the outside world but as subservient to those interests, he is the destined man of physical progression and peregrination ; the man of coloniza- tion, of compromise, of commerce. But by another conse- quence of this external ranging, the Teuton is peculiarly a 89 man of final causes. For, like all men, he supplies the weak side of his own intellect, by assuming that the divinity lias made provision in that behalf. This belief is even the main- spring of his genuine religion : for all nicer combination surprises him as miracle, and he is religious through interest, not like the Italian, through obedience. His philosophy and even science are likewise left at loose ends, as, for instance, in Malthus's monstrous system. It is this gentilitial weakness of the organizing faculty, this view of things external as but a crowd of particulars, that the poet would intimate by Hamlet's reflection, and which is betrayed also by the vogue of the passage. Poor as are, it is perceived, the pretensions to philosophy which the reflections cited could furnish to Hamlet, yet they go- to prove that Shakespeare must have meant them of the race. To ascribe them to the barbarous Hamlet of history, the wilds of Scandinavia, and the depths of the middle ages, would be the grossest of all even his infractions of the unities ; for here the breach would turn on the unity of character, in which alone the poet is esteemed faultless by the critics. Yet these writers speak of Hamlet as an essence of "philosophy," without the less supposing him the person of the chronicle ! It is true he is made a " scholar," and a student of a Univer- sity. But these things would scarce, even in our own day, imply philosophy. Besides, a special reason has been pointed out by Schlegel. He remarks with ingenuity that the purpose of Shakespeare, in representing Hamlet as a student of Wittenburg, was to invest his hero, through the name of this city, with the prestige of the mystic Faust, of Avhom it had E 2 90 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. "been the place of residence, and with whose character the English public were then acquainted through the stage. He might have added the connection with the same University of a person scarce less mystic to the English imagination, and at that epoch revered as a new prophet — Martin Luther. These are aids which it is, in fact, exceedingly probable that Shake- speare was too skilful a playwright to neglect. But the scholarship had mainly a gentilitial character, as will be noted after, on descending to minor details. 6. The mention of Dr. Eaust suggests a curious confirma- tion, that Hamlet's philosophy, as now explained, denotes the race. There is no work in any language more essentially idiosyncratic than the celebrated Faust of Goethe. This other sphynx of the critics may be now at last unriddled. Eaust is the embodiment of the Italic race with its antiquarian learning, formal religion, and cloistered torpor, as imposed upon the youth of the Teutonic intellect : he is accordingly an adept also in sorceries and drugs; he sells his soul for power and lust, the ruling passions of that race. Mephis- tophiles is the intellect of the Teutonic race, breaking through this antique thraldom, and endeavouring to undermine it. When asked why, with the dim analytical instinct, he calls himself a "part," he explains that he "was a part of the primeval darkness which brought forth the light that would now pretend to be all [the Eoman Church.] But he (the light) succeeds not. For strive as he will, he clings, as if hound, to bodies ; he streams from bodies ; gives beauty to bodies ; but a body [the Teutonic worldliness] stops him in his course, and so I hope he will perish of materialism before HAMLET. 91 long." 1 This, it is perceived, is to a hair the Italian intellect, in its inductive exteriority and concrete compass, as now interpreted. Of Mephistophiles himself, the express purpose, the com- mission, as the basis of the poem, is the temptation of Faust, whom the Lord calls his "servant," as he calls the tempter "the denying spirit." "What ! cries he to this personage on coming to ask permission , " Do you ever present yourself hut to grumble. Is there nothing to your mind in the state of things on earth?" The answer is no; that " all things there are as had as possible." Is not that English 1 The answer to Faust upon enquiring who he is, is to the same purport : "1 am the spirit that constantly denies, and denies rightly, the spirit of destruction, or what men call evil." And the reply to a repetition of the question is still nicer : "I am a part of that power which is ever willing evil and doing good." That is to say, analysis, which looks but for destruction, but results in the removal of an obstacle to real construction. In the same scenes, there are also some profound touches of detail. Thus Faust, in translating, " in the beginning was the Word," is made to render the word by deed; in due conformity to the practical and objective Italian. Mephistophiles, on the contrary, vindicates the word, with the Teutonic predilection for the subjective and personal. Faust's reply to the cor- rection is also finely conceived : " That in persons of his impious and destroying character, the essence may be learned from the name" For in analysis, the essence is evaporated to nomenclature. It is the ground of that long contest 1 Mephistophiles. The Study Scene. 92 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. between those two races, represented by the terms Kealism and Nominalism. Another incident of the portraiture may seem in contra- vention, hut is only still more subtly and curiously significant. Faust supposes all is done when he agrees to the bargain ; but Mephistophiles slyly asks for " a line or two in writing." This might seem at variance with his preference for the word. But in the first place, the writing is still a sort of word, and with the physical fixation so requisite to his intellect. More- over, he is conscious of its fallaciousness in himself, as being the servant of the conscience which may change with varying interests, 1 and therefore, by analogy, distrusts the word of others. He, on the other hand, has slight sense of the traditional obligations of family, honour, religion, which bind the Italian. Accordingly, another Teuton title is, a man of 1 However much it is the study of the writer to touch as generally or as gently, upon matters of delicate application or detail, as the tenor of the argument will permit, the consequences he ascribes in the text to the rule of conscience may be usefully authenticated more expressly from Shakespeare. The poet makes the play-king — of whom the design is to analyse the workings of the conscience of the usurper — deliver to his royal partner the following moral homily : — I do believe you think what now you speak; But what we do determine, oft we break. Purpose is but the slave of memory ; Of violent birth, but poor validity : Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, But fall unshaken when they mellow be. Most necessary 'tis that -we forget To pay ourselves ivhat to ourselves is debt: What to ourselves in passion we propose, The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. Act iii. sc. 2. HAMLET. 93 contracts. The Normans were in France a proverb of this trait ; and even in congenial England were distinguished for their love of writs. In the Saxons, the feature is concurrent •with their commerce. Nay, the very philosophers, and one the least commercial, the profound Locke, must think society to have "been founded on a -written compact ! But why then, retorts perhaps some irritable reader, imagining again the " Passion " here means, all conscious motives. And if it should be supposed to he peculiar to the tyrant, let us turn to the hero himself. Hamlet apologises to Laertes — Was't Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet : If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away, And when he's not himself, does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it then? His madness ; if it be so, Hamlet is of the party that is wronged; His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy. Here is the culprit not merely self-acquitted, but transmuted into a victim : a metamorphosis not unfamiliar in English actual life. Dr. Johnson was nicer in morality than criticism, when he grumbled at this defence — " it being unsuitable to the character of a good and brave man to shelter himself in falsehood." As if the whole course of the man in question was not a "falsehood!" As if a "good" man could have assumed this mask of falsehood to commit murder ! As if a "brave" one could have descended to the double degradation of belying his own convictions, and playing the idiot to the world, to the end of perpetrating the atrocity with full security to his own skin ! Thus the doctor was even in morals, though unconsciously, Pharasaical ; straining at a gnat, •and swallowing a camel. But the doctor was himself a Teuton. So in all the Teutonic plays; for instance, Richard III. — Queen. — Shall I forget myself to be myself? Rich. — Aye, if yourself s remembrance wrong (injure) yourself. In fine, it is an English popular proverb: That a man's words are his own no longer than he keeps them unspoken. 94 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. exposition to be thwarted — why are the English themselves without a written constitution 1 For the plainest of all reasons, if the clew be kept to duely. The disposition which is most sensible to the necessity of binding others, is that which likes to be towards others, and even itself, as loose as possible. The English Constitution is also a thing of Con- science. This brief analysis, besides explaining an enigmatical production, unfolds a curious confirmation of the theory thus far. But the particular object was to note, in the poet him- self, an authoritative sample of the gentditial mind. Goethe is accounted at once the most national, and all but the most eminent genius of the race ; and the nondescript production in question is his masterpiece. Of this the philosophy is now before the reader. The two ideas explained com- pose the substance of the work, as it was first conceived and even published by the author. And in him they were not ideas, but feelings or reflections. He may have had some notion of his own race in Mephistophiles, but surely not a dream of the Italian in Faust. With any such conception, in philosophical distinctness, such a man could have no difficulty in extending the work indefinitely. But what are the well-known facts 1 Having published the first sketch by the title of " a fragment," — an evident avowal of his being destitute of plan — he was pressed on all sides to give com- pletion to the essay; and after keeping it in hand a great part of his long life, he at last issued the enlarged form with the same title still ; and very justly, the addition being but sheer rigmarole. Not a step in the development of the first ground or characters ; his only effort seems to have been to HAMLET. 95 conjure up some interest by tortuosities of metre and tricks of incident or effect. "With the peculiar sub-acuteness and savoir faire that distinguished him, he knew his impotence might thus be passed upon the critics for profundity. Their ponderous admiration may be easily conceived to have afforded liim many moments of Mephistophelian grin or laughter. Schlegel, his acquaintance, seems to intimate as much. He tells us that Goethe could never be induced to give any explanation on this or his other writings. He also observes that he never wrote prefaces. In this he shewed his usual prudence. The prefaces and introductions of the writers of this race would be logical curiosities if compared with the works. Even in the physical sense, there is, for instance, in English, a recent publication of a distinguished man of science, in which the preface is to the body in about the ratio of three to one ; also another, in which the first volume, of some seven hundred pages, leaves the preface un- finished — nee dum finitus Orestes. Goethe then was right in keeping shy of prefaces. But for the explanations, he had a different reason. Explanations can be given but by systematic thinkers ; and Goethe was a thinker of reflection or negation, his constructions being but phantasmagoria of imagination. De Stael, with her French susceptibility to this defect, has best defined him, notwithstanding her naive admiration, by saying that " Goethe should have lived amidst an intellectual chaos." This, however, need not bar his having been a great poet, and even made some curious scientific suggestions. The point in cpiestion is his philosophy, or rather philosophizing, and this is seen to be identical with that of Hamlet and the race. It is, in fine, then, a philo- 96 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. sophy of tlie degree called metaphysics ; a philosophy of emanation, not conception or rationality. It is proper to the races in whom the mnscnlar system is predominant, in its proportional development, above the nervous. It recurs in a like condition of the individual growth, in those yearnings for the infinite which mark the epoch of adolescence. A poet inferior hut to Shakespeare in knowledge of the human heart, ascribes it to his hero, Don Juan, at such a crisis ; whom he describes, with a wickedness of wit no less dis- tinctive, as Turning, without knowing his condition, Like Coleridge, into a metaphysician. In fact, Coleridge is a type of the Teutonical philosophy, and accordingly entitles his system " Aids to 7. The test of Manners and muscularity is equally in keeping. Dr. Johnson supposed Hamlet to have played the madman best in his outrageous behaviour to Ophelia. What, therefore, did the Doctor's own well-recorded growls at im- pertinent young ladies, and old ones too, betoken ? But aside from the example, the psychology was bad. Such 1 For example, he says of Hamlet, " lie is brave and careless of life ; but he vacillates from sensibility and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the intensity of resolve." — (Notes on Shak.) There is a specimen of Coleridgian psychology as well as criticism. He, however, admits that " Hamlet's wildness is but half false (feigned) ; he plays the subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near really being what he acts." This, too, is in the author's misty vein. But the cause of all, in Hamlet, is not, as Coleridge rants, an excess of intellect, but rather a defect of it ; not an excessive generalizing, but an universal personalizing. 97 brutality is not among the symptoms of madness. On the contrary, insanity produces a certain delicacy. And the reason with relation to the sexes is obvious. Deranging but the pure intellect, it leaves that passion to its natural torpor, unexcited by the common stimulant of a depraved or weak intelligence. The observation of daily life would have saved Shakespeare from the absurdity. What this poet, who knew the crotchets of his kind as by an instinct, meant to paint, was the brutality of a cold, a coarse and selfish nature, which takes a species of malignant pleasure in giving pain even where it loves ; and also perhaps, by a still more exquisite refinement, he would intimate, that such a nature would appease its love in this perverse way for want of better. This conjecture is borne out by both the play and the chronicle. In the former, the private intercourse of Hamlet with Ophelia is,, their positions considered, of boarding-school reserve, and he resigns himself without a struggle to the interdiction of his visits. It is true he proclaims afterwards, above her outraged grave, thai : - the love of forty thousand brothers could not make up the sum of his." Bui this truly thrasonic simile is a fine touch to the same effect. Another, perhaps, is the acrimony manifested towards his mother, before suspicion of any crime, on mere account of her marriage, and the grossness of the language, in which he dwells upon the nuptial motives : for this bet; ays one who here too Avould "speak daggers" for want of using them. And hence the rudeness to Ophelia, which in the p] is noted madness. This construction of the poet's purport is • > kcd ; more- over, by the mythic prototype. According to the Danish 98 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. chronicle, the uncle, to unmask Hamlet, had him. led into a wood and left alone with a tempting woman : a criterion, by the way, which proves the Dane of the middle-ages somewhat deeper in pathology than the Doctor of the eighteenth century. But .the lady (so runs the story) pro- claimed the prince's perfect continence ; though he said otherwise himself, preferring vanity to even security. These profound vestiges, impressed by nature upon tradition in its slow formation, were things for Shakespeare to feel by genius, not for his critics to find by rule. Still another from the chronicle pretends, that when Hamlet obtained, by forgery, not only the execution of his two attendants, but also the Anglo-Saxon princess in marriage, he quitted England on the ceremony, and without the consummation. Such are, there- fore, the fully sane and deeply natural instigations to the malignant and obscene rudeness of Hamlet towards Ophelia, Some critics have the hardihood to throw out more than hints, that it was actually the high-life mode of courtship in England. But it is sufficient to prove it to be in the race in general, without examining if special portions have matched the stage in its enactment. And if there still should be a doubt that Shakespeare painted traits of race, let the doubter weigh the still more native portraiture referred to. Let him ponder on the conduct of Mephistophiles to Ms mate, while Faust is pressing Margaret with true Italian fervour. Let him. finally reflect upon the flesh-and-blood example of Goethe himself in his peculiar amours. The moral bearing of the Muscularity is best brought out in the burial scuffle. Some silly commentators, who make Hamlet a special ideal of the English, will have his "rant" HAMLET. 99 on this occasion (as he calls it hiinself) and his attack upon Laertes, be but signs of love and grief — " The bravery of his grief did put me in a towering passion." Here, proceed they, the term " bravery" discovers admiration, and therefore Hamlet had intended but to emulate the brother. — But what becomes of the " towering passion," which is scarce the form of tender rivalry 1 It seems more naturally the effect of a domineering selfishness. Quite accordingly, the simple meaning of the word "bravery" is there bravado ; a demonstration more fit than grief to pique the rivalry of a kindred sentiment. Thus, in Othello, Brabantio describes the conduct of Boderigo, in annoying him by the night-scene, as a " malicious bravery." In fine, the phrase of Hamlet occurs in an apology for just such conduct, or having, as he says, " forgot himself to Laertes" : a confession that displays the gumption or desperation of the said critics. Every syllable of the harangue is in conformity with this construction. " To outface me with leaping into her grave," exclaims the bully, who regards her, even in death, as the sole property of his caprices. And then, as if to bar all doubt, he is made to offer to decide the contest by a fight, or a fast, or a dose of vinegar, or a dish of crocodile ! Verily a chivalrous and sentimental lover ! But in the name of common sense, not to say dramatic poetry, what mean these low grotescpienesses in a prince, as still interpreted '? Yet Shakespeare will be owned not to have been without a mean- ing ; and in fact, it becomes plain from the new point of view. The allusion is to that adjunct of a powerful muscularity — a vigorous and voracious stomach ; a blessing which is known to distinguish the English. 1 Thus there was science in 1 So deeply real and highly rated has it been throughout the race, 100 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. the conjunction of fighting and eating ; and the fasting came in as an exponent by exclusion. Still, evasion might be possible, but that these sly thrusts into the stomach of the nation, and into various other parts, are much more frequent in this poet than was suspected by his audience. The " fasting," that the chief religious ceremony of the Northmen was a feast, and a feast, moreover, of horse-flesh. It was (with reverence be it spoken) a species of Host or communion with these people, who paid worship to the horse. They made voracity an attribute of even their divinities. Witness tbe passage of the Edda called " Thor's Journey," which describes the divine contests, among others, between Lopt and Loke ; who, pitted at the two ends of a huge trough of meat, were to vie wbo should the sooner eat his way to the middle. The one had only eaten the meat, but left the bones ; the other devoured meat, bones, trough, and all together. It may be humbly submitted that the ideal of the myth would be improved had he been made to eat his adversary also. Yet so naive to this day is the sympathy with these exploits, that there are several translations of the story into English, where the contest seems more classic among the literateurs than that of Menelaus and Hector, or Achilles and the Scamander. The last of the translators is a young Irish lord, who, perhaps to atone for his birth and rent-roll in the G-reenlsle, is enraptured with the jarls,vihings, and berserkers of the North. After giving us his version, he adds disdainfully the comment, that " the practical and conscientious Norse mind could not be content with the puny godships of a Roman Olympus, with its nectar, sensuality, and inextinguishable laughter.'' Aye, practical with a vengeance, and conscientious in that practice ; but " mind " on the one side, and " sensuality'' on the other! But his lordship appears to be, conformably to his ambition, better versed in the Gothic than in the Greek Olympus. He perhaps never fell upon the following lines : — Oil yap oitov eSous', ov irivovs* a'fflcnra oivov' 'Tovveit avaifioves eicrr ical aQaveroi KaXiovrai. — Iliad, v. However, he is, after all, a rather clever fellow, and displays qualities of mind and manners not derived from the Berserkers. HAMLET. 101 for example, the most singular of the tests, occurs repeatedly in other pieces where the persons are Teutonic. In the very play in question, the Scandinavian Ghost, all spirit though he be, has not put off the greed of eating. He places as the climax of his description of hell, to he compelled " to fast in fire." The expression is Homeric in its naive intensity. It says that, to a Teuton, the fiercest torments of purgatory are but second to, or insignificant compared with, those of fasting. And this reminds one of two facts of long and positive history, and which will doubtless set the meaning of Shakespeare at rest. The one is, that fasting remains, through trial by jury, still the sanction and inspirer of English jurisprudence. The other is that, in the Eng- lish monasteries, in exception to all others, the prime punishment throughout the middle ages for misconduct, was to curtail the pious delinquents of a breakfast or dinner. Did the national stomach not co-operate with the brain, in getting rid of these popish and macerating super- stitions I 1 1 Shakespeare bad direct mythological authority. " Eating and drinking," says Mallet, " appear to have gone on in the hall of Hela [the infernal regions] much in the same manner as in that of Odin." — North. Antiq., Bohn's Ed., p. 486. The very intelligent and candid editor, Mr. Blackwell, remarks also respecting the Scandinavian theology, in contrast with the Persian, pretended to he its fountain, that "the latter system was calculated to form an energetic, intellectual, and highly moral people ; the Scandinavian, a semi-barbarous troop of crafty and remorse- less warriors, whose energy would be solely displayed in deeds of slaughter, and the social intervals of their turbulent existence passed amidst scenes of the coarsest festivity." — Ibid. p. 476. Walter Scott also, in one of his earlier writings, before the golden harvest that set in from the English had disclosed the superiority of 102 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. Then what say you, it may he urged, to "the glass of fashion and the mould of form." Why, in the first place, this race to his own — has the following highly graphic and variously life-like portraiture. Even, heathen yet, the savage Dane At Jol more deep the mead did drain ; High on the beach bis galleys drew, And feasted all his pirate crew ; Then, in his low and pine-built ball, Where shields and axes deck'd the wall, They gorged upon the half-dress' 'd steer, Caroused in seas of sable beer ; While round, in brutal jest, were thrown The half-gnawed rib, and marrow bone : Or listened all in grim delight, While Scalds yelled out the joys of fight : Then forth, in frenzy, would they hie, While wildly-loose their red locks fly, And dancing round the blazing pile, They make such barbarous mirth the while, As best might to the mind recall The boisterous joys of Odin's hall. Marmion, Canto vi. The importance of the stomach in English economy is attested by a fact perhaps more curious and conclusive still, than even the juridical and the monastic usages. It will be best presented in the language of a native poet. Prior, in the ingenious peregrinations of his " Alma," makes her take in the youth of his own country the following guise : To master John the English maid A hornbook gives of gingerbread ; And that the child may learn the better, As he can name, he eats the letter : Proceeding thus with vast delight, He spells and gnaws from left to right. This was surely " to teach the young idea how to shoot" from the substantial root of things. Accordingly, the practice pursues John HAMLET. 103 that the likeness were not consummate without them. It is muscle in abundance that gives the mould to manly form, provided it be well distributed, which is, however, not usual here ; but then the eulogy in question is from a woman and a lover, both whom Shakespeare kneAV too well to make them critical in the enamoured. As to the fashion, it is the feature that first arrests the eye of a continental traveller on passing to London. To keep to the bare person, the barbers' shops are hung with curls ; the locks and whiskers (when there is sufficient to afford purchase to the through after life. He may he seen on any day at the desks of the Museum library, not perhaps spelling, but even writing and at the same time "gnawing" apace; sometimes too with his croc of butter, and in smug cases even his flask, to the ineffable disgust of every serious non-English student. The thing, however, it must be owned, is a sovereign recipe against your visionary theorizing, and goes for much in "the practical and conscientious Gothic mind." And that the passage to this mind through the stomach was no accident, is proved by another horn-book devised for the national infancy. To allure the Anglo-Saxons to learn to read, the wily priesthood of Rome soon discovered the expedient of sending them some missals printed in gold letters. Forth- with these wild men became ri vetted to the page, and gospel light as well as letters entered, through the magic metal, these huge children by the eyes, as "Master John" by the cesophagus. Yet this is the people of whom it is pretended, that in ages when their own fertile country was but half occupied, and when the nation scarce outnumbered the population of actual London, they repaired in large colonies, from this soil of beef and beer, to the land of oat-cakes and of "beggarly Scots;" a land, too, where they were wont, in their political invasions of even its least poor districts, to suffer so from hunger, that one time several thousands of them eat to bursting on their return ; a land, in fine, of which the whole cultivable region was given up to them, by those notoriously simple and unresisting Scots, from whom, however, the whole nation failed to ever wring a rood of it ! 104 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. irons) are curled on the very policemen, more especially the most muscular and jolly of the " force." The ladies, young or old, are scarcely ever without ringlets. It is curious that the curling-tongs was the chief implement of civilization imported by our grandmothers from the regions of the Baltic. The Germans wore, says Juvenal, the hair twisted into horns — ccesariem torquentem comaa. At the other extremity of the gentilitial history, we had, not many years ago, a memorable monarch, of whom the nation boasted as " the first gentleman of Europe," apparently for wearing the best frizzled wig. So that Shakespeare makes Ophelia pay the type of this race no unmeaning or moderate compliment ; and Hamlet himself, in describing his father, does not omit " Hyperion's curls." Another woman, who knew Hamlet still more intimately, even Ins mother, in presenting him her napkin to wipe the perspiration, is made to break the illusion and mention him as plainly " fat ;" and certain critics have improved the hint to conclude that the part of Hamlet was played upon the London stage by Sir John Falstaff himself ! What a fall was there, my fellow-critics ! They had forgotten, no doubt, already, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, and that this use of the term "fat" means muscularity, not adiposity. Hamlet himself ex- claims, in one of Ins soliloquies : " ! that this too, too solid flesh would melt," etc. Tins strange ejaculation affords the best of comments, and now acquires a meaning itself. Like much beside in Hamlet, it would be insane rant if rigorously judged upon the ordinary principles. It is only as the sentiment of a muscular plethora (if the term may be used) that such a wish is comprehensible j for Shakespeare 105 analyses less by conduct than by feelings. Other dramatists, French especially, allow their characters to utter but the results of that inner working which precedes all word and action. Their distinct purposes and their proprieties are there- fore more or less factitious, as being fashioned to the object, the occasion, the exterior. Shakespeare, on the contrary, especi- ally in the soliloquies, gives expression to those fleeting and fantastic feelings of which every one is conscious as passing in the mind, but which no one ever did or ever would think of uttering ; and as they are devoid of all preparation, and taken in the act of distillation from the organism, they underflow the accidents of personality, place, and time, and disclose the deeper current of the gentilitial character. It is the principle of the importance attached in all times to dreaming, in those races where muscularity gives it particular vividness ; and indeed Shakespeare's soliloquies are a sort of oneiromancy, with the difference that there the dreamer is made also the interpreter. But the most singularly deep of all these master-touches of the character of Hamlet and the race is the following. For, says Hamlet to Laertes, in holding him by the throat — For though I am not splenetic and rash, Yet I have in me something dangerous, Which let thy wisdom fear. Those who know the German character, would in this lurk- ing " something," with its phlegmatic endurance, see at once the poet's design. They make nothing for the action of the piece as conceived currently, nor for the character of Hamlet as the historic personage. It is only upon viewing him as the Teutonic race, that the two qualities assume the perti- 106 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. nence and the profundity of an inspiration. They are, accordingly, both conspicuous in the ideal of this race, as painted by itself instinctively in the Scandinavian heroes. Those giants of muscle are represented as to be brought to even fight, by no abuse or provocation short of goading with a pike or sword point. But when the steel is brought to touch on the physical confines of their personality, they burst into a fury that lays about it on friend and foe. This fit or flow of the " something dangerous " is also known from plain history to have, on more than one occasion, seized whole armies of Germans ; and, in short, the disposition is so com- mon to the race, that it has got an appellation in the language, meaning enraged wolves} These ebullitions of irritability or uncontrollable muscularity, with their known interludes of sulk and silliness, might be called madness if we please ; even like the brow-beating towards Laertes, and the brutality to Ophelia. But the opinion or the name makes not the conduct the less normal, or Shakespeare's wonderful delinea- tion less faithful to the true original. This original, in fine, is traceable in even the lowest buffooneries employed by Shakespeare in the scenes of mad- ness, and even in some he dared not copy. Not only peers it in the cry of Hamlet — " a rat, a rat ! " when he stabs Polonius, but in the particular still more grotesque of the chronicle on the occasion, to the effect that the madman enters the apartment of his mother, crowing, and flapping both his arms in imitation of a cock. These nai'vities are still familiar in the honest horse-play of our cousins. What they must be in the " faderland" may be inferred a fortiori 1 Berserkers. HAMLET. 107 from a case "which has been recently observed in the heart of London. At a party or gathering sprinkled thickly with Germans, a stalwart Teuton, who is professor, it appears, in an English college, was playing on the piano in concert to his stunning voice, when off he started of a sudden, dis- appearing among the crowd. Presently all eyes, and more emphatically ears, were attracted to the opposite extremity of the room, by what appeared to be an energetic wood-sawyer at work — so loud and puffing that the work seemed rather moved by mill than muscle. How the huge mimic, who was found ascpiat in an angle behind some furniture, effected this, with hands and gullet, was not easily conceivable. But the whole company, both English and German, enjoyed the feat, and showed no wonder, unless it was at the diversity of the accomplishments. It seems, however, that to a spectator who looked unbiased on both the scenes, this grave professor in a crowded chamber, a foreign country, and the nineteenth century, starting stealthily to play by turns the piano and the saw- mill, must appear also to play the fool, with far less dubious probability, than would the cock-crowing of a wild young prince in a wilder age and his mother's closet. The conclusion is, that both played a character of the same race. 1 8. The last criterion whereby this race was to be traced in Hamlet's conduct, was that excess of introverted personality known as Selfishness. But this is plainly the rank root of most that has been shown of Hamlet. It sends its influence 1 M. Guizot says of Hamlet : " Foil par calcul, peut-etre un pen, par nature ; ardent a venger la mort de son pere et habile a veillerpour sa propre vie." — (Shakespare et son Temps, p. 204.) 108 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. even up to the supreme energy of intellect, as declared by Mm profoundly in saying, his " eye is in his mind." It is the picturesque definition of the faculty of reflection, which sees the objects of the senses refracted through the self. This mother motive, in its negative action, explains the laxity of Hamlet's vengeance. He is quite evidently rather lukewarm in affection for even his father ; his interview with the ghost, if read in this view, will seem shocking ; and not a single filial accent relieves his virulence to the mother. To the former he speaks as follows, when the interview is over, and the ghost, which he knows his father's, is still heard moving beneath the floor. " Artthou there, true-penny V — "Well said, old mole :" precisely in the style' of a Mississippian of our own day. And this was also before Hamlet assumes the " antic disposition." When he breaks in on the ghost's description of the purgatorial torments, with the mechanically selfish shudder and exclamation : " Poor ghost !" the father, as if from earthly recollection of the son's character, bids him severely not "to pity, but to lend him his serious hear- ing." And yet the terrible description could have no other purpose than to reinforce, by pity, the filial piety of the listener. Does Shakespeare, therefore, set at variance the ghost's intention and injunction 1 jSTo ; but the latter was desigued as a rebuke, and not a rule. Enlightened by the preternatural experience of his own temperament, the ghost might have attained to a conception of the modern maxim, that " he who pities another, thinks upon himself.'''' Nor in sooth, should the sentiment be hastily decried. It is the real jfliilo- sophy of many a useful charity, " supported exclusively by volun- tary contributions.'''' As to the bearing towards the mother, it 109 is too clear in Hamlet's language. What seems still more sig- nificant, however, is, that the ghost should deem it requisite, in exciting him against the uncle, to charge him against laying violent hands upon the mother. He is, moreover, himself impelled to the necessity of protesting against his impulses to " use daggers" and repeat the part of Nero ; and if he does not, it seems not easy to find his abstinence another cause than that which equally indisposes him to play the part of Brutus. He is too centred in himself to hear affection to even his parents ; nay, not to hate them, like all else that thwarts his interests or tasks his ease. But what, then, was the poet's purpose in giving Hamlet these odious traits, if, as is commonly 'supposed, he meant to paint him en beau ? It was impossible to answer before the present theory. Shake- speare is painting the warrior race of Teutonism, winch must offer this organically social contrast with the Italian. The Romano-Italic race founded all things on the family. The Teutons, to dissolve this ancient fabric for reconstruction, must, it is obvious, be the contrary in this as all the rest. They must, as it was shewn, have neither family nor morality ; that is, traditional morality nor family veneration. Whether this be borne out by even present observation, the reader is left to decide j 1 reminding him, however, to make a due allowance 1 The decree of the Council of Armagh, in the twelfth century, abolish- ing the slavery of English people in Ireland — the only slavery that ever before existed there — states, in the preamble, respecting the English : " communi gentis vitio, liberos suos venales exponere," etc. The traffic in the "hurial fees'' some years back in London, -which was only sup- pressed by the hand of the Legislature, speaks the influence which civili- zation can have had on this trait of race. That the parents should reci- 110 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. for the disguises of civilization and the supplements of legis- lation. Long after the race became known to the Eomans, the custom remained, among certain German tribes, of putting their aged parents to death ; and with the Scandinavians, it was only Christianity that did away, in the tenth century, with the exposure of infants. Such is the justification or rather glorification of Shakespeare, He paints the race, in painting Hamlet devoid of filial piety. It. is accordingly not the father that Hamlet, after all, avenges ; he executes the vengeance, as he delayed it, for himself alone. With like profundity the great poet makes him die as he had lived — die the death of a bully; in an accidental scuffle, into which he must be wheedled, if not goaded, like his fabled countrymen ; die, as he lived, a canting egotist beneath the mask of a moral champion. In short, he never thinks or acts, or even abstains, but for himself; from the demand that first occurs to him on meeting, after long absence, his gentle lover, that she should pray for his soul, to that addressed with his dying breath to the faithful friend who would die with him, and whom he asks to " absent himself from the felicity of the future world, and endure in this the procate the piety of the children, is, of course, but part and parcel of the same constitution. The popular mass, who are the children of the State, were, up to the present century, trained for soldiers as a commerce, and sold in market overt by the petty kings of Germany. It is seen that a man with a theory is inexorable, his only "patriotism" being what he deems the- truth. But this is in reality the true patriotism. It finds in this case an extenuation for the foibles in question, by showing them incidental to the functions of the race. Most of the obloquy of nations, past and actual, as also of individuals, arises from the absurdity of exact- ing from them qualities essentially contradictory. HAMLET. Ill breath of pain," to the end of vindicating his memory. No- thing more complete in unity , pto. I! seems remarkable, as a suggestion of the purpose of the poet, that even H oratio^ .in the so le instan ce of self-sacrifice throucdmu t tlie__ play i , is made to tell us that he is therein " mor e an antique Roman th an a, Dnnp." In fine, revenge, the common motive of even the secondary murders, and much the basis of the play, is the most selfish of all the passions. It is accord- ingly among the earliest to actuate savage life. But it pursues the soldier races even into civilisation, as a provi- dential check upon their tendency to abuse force. It could be easily identified in certain national animosities. But it appears to be more useful to extenuate its obloquy, by the concurrent explanation of a paradox just intimated. 9. The paradox is, that a tragedy of first-class power and popularity could have been raised, against all rule, upon the basis of a selfish passion. The sole solution of both the daring and success of Shakespeare is now supplied ; it is, that Hamlet, and so his passions are not individual, but gentilitial. In fact, a passion may be dramatic or social in two ways — in the object, when it may affect the public by its consequences ; in the subject, when it is partaken in by many, though individually. Thus does revenge, although quite personal, acquire through number a general interest, when it is recognized as subjectively common to a great race ; but it is interest of character, not of action, like the other ; so that the fact of this play's continued impressiveness upon the stage Avould of itself suffice to prove that it paints a race, and paints by character. It should moreover be observed that, taken in 112 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. the usual sense, the viudictiveness is here but the fulcrum, not the lever. The real spring, as -well of interest as action, in the play of Hamlet, is that dark side of the character which keeps the vengeance from its common course. The nature of an Italian, with this passion in his heart, and a dagger in his hand, is to rush instantly upon his object ; he never even thinks of himself or his safety. The Teuton is known to have at least an equal portion of good, that is, evil will ; and so, when he is seen in like circumstances to prevaricate, through motives quite unseen, he becomes a curious problem. It is not noted that he has within Mm a personal or selfish instinct, which counterweighs all passion that would plunge him into vital danger ; and that, even on the field of battle, he fights but for self-safety, his pugnacity or destructiveness being his least interested motive. To unwind this inside clockwork to the world was the task of Shakespeare j and if his profound execution continues misconceived, it is but what may be observed of the real life of his original. A certain portion of this race pass the characters referred to for "steadiness," "reflection," "manly scorn of assassination," and in short, most of the other virtues, at this hour, upon even their enemies. It is no marvel, then, that Hamlet should be interpreted by like rules. But these remarks do not invali- date the argument or application respecting the gentilitial nature of the revenge, and which bore upon the common notions of both the passion and the play. A like dilution of the virus through this gentilitial men- struum takes place in all the other modes of selfishness or excess. This may palliate the harsher features of the portrait to national vanity, if such an object were of dignity to merit 113 more than a closing notice. It will also serve to obviate another possible objection. How can Hamlet, as now expounded — an incarnation of selfishness, unexalted by a positive virtue, a useful actiou, or a noble passion, nay, unre- lieved by the least ignoble of the infirmities, ambition — how can Hamlet, it may be urged, have not alone escaped abhor- rence, but won the sympathy of even the thoughtful, and passed a hero with the multitude ? This is, doubtless, to be ranked among the miracles of genius. But as far as analyzable, it seems reduce able to three causes. There, is first, the attenuation, just explained, of the vicious cpialities, by being exhibited less in action than in character, in tendency. Then the fact of the incoherence, and the air of candour, of the character, and which, appearing to preclude malice, enlist the interest inspired by weakness ; for discreet virtue is more distrusted or less beloved than dis- ordered vice — the latter flattering our vanity or tempting our cupidity. The third and paramount palliation of Hamlet's character is through his preaching. In the dramatic as the real world, men judge by deeds less than by words. Hamlet tells them that he sets not " a pin's head" upon his life, and they believe him, though the whole play be a shameful strife to elude even risking it. As they deck him thus with bravery, so with beauty and generosity, from the eulogy of a lover and the epitaph of a friend. There is, moreover, an air of courage, disinterestedness, superiority, in finding fault with all that* other men appear content with or revere ; the envious multitude, who applaud, can see no farther than the bare negation, but take destruction for con- struction, although its natural antagonist. But there is also, 2 F 114 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. no doubt, an instinct of the real utility of the critical spirit, which is the proper social mission of this race of liberty and reformation. While these considerations seem sufficient to account for the unreasonable partiality to the Hamlet of the play, an English writer may be pardoned for reminding, in conclusion, that the character does not include the better qualities of the race. These were naturally on the surface, and too familiar to be dramatic. The special sphere of Shakespeare's genius, as now evinced, was the interior, the side of darkness, in both the moral and the intellectual sense : for human con- duct, however blooming and even fruitful upon the branches, will smell and taste " of the earth, earthy," upon descending into the roots. "Without remembering this main position, it after all might seem improbable that Shakespeare could have meant a portrait so candid of his own nation. But besides, it is a fact, that he, through writings so voluminous, and of a nature that peculiarly subjected them to public influence, has not descended, in a single character, perhaps not even in a single line, to the low prudence or prepossession of even national adulation. It is a glory that lifts the man to a level with the poet, although it perhaps cost no effort, nay, was commonly unconscious. It is the nature of the mind that is really " born for the universe." And Burke, in giving, or being able to give, his mind up to party, shewed infallibly, by the fact, that he ill merited the eulogy. When Dr. Johnson said that Hamlet is " more an instru- ment than an agent," he little thought that, instead of criticism, he was complimenting Shakespeare. In the drama which it is the glory of this poet-philosopher to have 115 installed — the drama of interior man, and thus of gentilitial character — the persons all, it seems now clear, can be but instruments, exponents. Accordingly, in the piece in ques tion, the various secondary personages are, as Anil be proved in form, no less faithful to the race; — from the naive and rather feeble-minded amiability of Ophelia, back to the Ghost, whose starch formalities and insignificant procrastina- tions would serve to pass him for an actual diplomat of the Germanic Confederation. If the reader has been conducted to compass duly the views submitted ; to ascend this new region of the genius of the great poet, he must conceive it scarcely human that the execution had been all deliberate, or even a deliberate selec- tion from the chronicle. He will incline, perhaps, to see in the phenomenon a refined proof, that Shakespeare was in reality of the Teutonic race ; that in this sympathy lay a " divinity that shaped" the delicacies and the depths, while the poet could, in full consciousness, have scarce done more than rough-hew. Before deciding, however, let him wait to see a portraiture in which such sympathy could only thwart — that of Macbeth and the Celtic race. CHAPTEE III. MACBETH, AS TYPE OF THE CELTIC RACE. 1. As, in the animal system, the third or nervous tissue is the mediator, the combiner, and the regulator of the " extreme tissues, so in the social life of Europe the race which executes the like function, of successively controlling and progressively organizing the despotic and dispersive instincts of the Italic and Teutonic races, is, as indicated by its history and local position, the Celtic. From this mediatorial character must flow, then, the criteria. They must, by consequence, not be contrary to those of the extremes, as these antagonistic characters have been to one another : contrariety can subsist but between two things in a plane or system. The relation of the third race must be that of opposition. Superimposed upon both the former and thus advanced into a higher plane, while it assimilates to either in the regions of abutment, its main direction passes off in the diagonal to their conflictiou, and thus diverts them from their tendency to mutual annihilation into the orbit of progression, co-operation, and futurity. 11 The corresponding tests must be therefore as follow : In intellect, the predominance of the Eeasoning faculty, as opposed to the reflective and the perceptive tendencies ; or, in the language of method, the control and the comple- tion of induction and analysis, by the means of synthesis : the conduct, ratiocinative, circumspective, systematic. In morality, the test of media or the Consequences of the act, as opposed to the criteria of motives and of ends ; for Season, coming at last to know that human impulses or pur- poses cannot possibly have power to alter the moral order of the universe, resigns itself to learn and pursue this natural order, through a tissue of relations, where all is graduated consequence. In speculation, this race should be Methodic, organizing, as opposed to the exclusively accumulative and explorative ; and in the theologic aspect, set the fixity of institution against the turbulence of prophetism and the torpor of priestcraft ; or, in more familiar terms, Calvinism or Gallicanism, against the extreme contraries of Eomanism and of Protestantism. The Manners should be at once dignified, courteous, and cordial, as proceeding from a temperament in which the nervous eminence has raised the slavishness of cel- lularity, and ruled the rudeness of muscularity. In fine, the tendencies, not introverted, individual as in Hamlet, nor retroverted to family passions and pursuits as in Iago ; but circumverted, expansive, generous, magnanimous, in one word, Social. As in the other races, these qualities run to vices. The mental one of Eeasoning, to a debilitating caution, a timidity of action in new or weighty undertakings, arising from the power of calling up by forecast all contingencies. In the 118 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. moral test of Consequences, the excess is a sort of callousness to every cruelty that is found implicated in the logic of the situation ; looking chiefly to the means which are the object of the Season, not to the motive as in the Conscience, nor to the end as in Eeligion, the man of reasoning, if hut once launched, may be impelled from crime to crime, without malevolence of purpose, without cruelty of character, but merely in obedience to the consequential requisite of being consistent with what is done, and being consummative of what was planned : the premises committed, the conse- quences could not aggravate. The weak side of the philo- sophy is a similar indifference to the suggestions of the sentiments and superstitions of mankind, through a still premature reliance on the sufficiency of reason ; or otherwise it may be called excessive theorising, unbased upon the facts and the traditions of the fellow races. The foible on the score of manners is incurred in the two-fold tendency, of being too open to impressions from society, which imparts fickleness, and of perverting the accom- plishments into a mask of dissimulation. The mad extreme of sociability assumes that form of ambition, which is neither brute avidity nor blind domination, but soars to what was well described as " the last infirmity of noble minds" — a lust to win the approbation, or even notice of the world, which drives to sacrificing private rights to the collective consideration. Now, both these qualities and failings, which are respec- tively all correlative, may be evinced beyond denial to mark distinctively the Celtic race, and should, according to the proposition, unfold the character and play of Macbeth. 110 2. The Reasoning faculty is signalised at the very outset of the piece, and in the emblematic prompters of the action, the so-called witches. For these are instruments of reason, that is media, of foreknowledge. The ordinary ■witches were pragmatic, not prophetic. ISTo more are the "Weird sisters, as is the current notion, of Gothic origin in either their nature or even name. The term " weird " is not derived from the Anglo-Saxon vyyrd, which merely signifies a word, and does not seem to have really borne, unless by late imitation, the mythologic import of the fatum of the Latin. The epithet is simply a Scottish crasis of wayward. But not this, in the ordinary English sense of froward, which would not well consort with the functions of those beings. The meaning and etymology are : wards of the way} And there is no superstition more peculiar to the Celts than this idea 1 This sense, if it ever prevailed among the English, has heen lost through confusion with the merely moral homophone. The dictionaries all derive the ward in wayward from the Anglo-Saxon weard, which is equal to the Latin versus. So that consequently wayward means fo-wards the way, and is said of one disposed to pursue his own ways, or volitions, or whims. But how does this comport with the equally English "fro- ward," of which the composition is exactly the contrary, and which is, notwithstanding, made equivalent in meaning ? The matter is consigned to the hehests of the lexicographers, it heing sufficient here that the fact supports the text. Moreover, it is known that the word " weird '' is of Scotch origin, as Johnson admits, in authorising it by Gavin Douglas ; and that here the term wayward, from which it was contracted, observed the English analogy of the words vanward and rearward. For these denote respectively not towards the van and rear, but the ward, the watch, the guard of these extremities of the army. It is, however, to be owned that, in the Teutonic idioms, the expressions to ward off and to turn toioards are close synonyms. A curious comment on the warrior and other traits of the race. 120 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. of fairies, individually or in small bands, frequenting soli- tary pathways to watch, and waylay mortals. It would be eminently rife in the vast moor wilds of the Highlands. Such, accordingly, is the scene where the weird sisters were encountered. And we have also, in this itinerant peculia- rity, the explanation of the description which Shakespeare gives them, of " posters of the sea and land." Still more broadly does the nature or attributes of the weird sisters protest against another Gothic pedigree from the valkyriur. These — more popularly known as the hand- maids of Odin — were the opposite in all things, function, form, age, number. They were young, they were beautiful, they were unfixed in number, they were Hebes to the beer- drinking divinity of the North. They were also a sort of ambulances of the dead on the field of battle, a service equally conformable to the propensions of a warrior race. It was thus the Arabian houris bore off the souls of the fallen heroes. The Teutonic ones had further some minor attributions, which are not now more easy than important to be settled — the celestial institutions and economy of this race having been as undefined and disorderly as the terrestrial. In fine, these women were of Paradise (if one could desecrate the name by applying it to a porter-house), and not all of earth ; which puts them wholly beyond the precincts of the category in question. On the contrary, the weird sisters were of earth, if not humanity^ they were aged, to symbolise maturity of knowledge ; ugly and equivocal to the extent of having beards, to denote the cold survival of the passions by the knowing faculty ; had, as functions, the disclosure, 121 by natural means, of future events, and operated purely to the end of explanation : in fine, they were only three, a number sacred with the Celts. The derivation of Macbeth's witches from the Scandinavian houris is thus too variously absurd to be an effort of mere ignorance. This was probably assisted by the modern pretensions of and for the Lowland Scotch to Teutonic origin — an origin extended perhaps (ex post facto) to even Macbeth ; and the presumption that the Lowlands thns gave all things to Scotland. But the genius of Shakspeare has seized, athwart this trumpery, with his usual divinity of instinct, the profound truth. The full establishment of this truth runs out too long for even a note, and is subjoined as a dissertation at the end of the volume. It will shew that the poet has, not only in this instance, but throughout his entire writings, been inspired by the laws of race, no less remarkably in his preter- natural than in the natural personnel. A slight summary will here suffice for the machinery of the play in question. The witches proper of modern times are of Eomano- Italian origin ; a race which, bike them, has been shewn expert in magic, drugs, poisonings ; a race, too, of patriarchy, and thus of procreation, and to whose instincts the female sex, when beyond bearing, seemed unnatural? The Teutons 1 It is a singular confirmation, that in the Celtic Erse and Gaelic, this impression has, in fact, furnished the appellative for witch. It is in Irish buid-seach. The first component is the genitive case of bud (i.e. mem- brum virile), and the seach means dried up, decayed, disused; in short, in the fastidious French expression, passee. So, the Irish word for sorcery, piseog, has a similar origin, with the mere difference of bearing on the female state irrelatively. The first syllable, or pish, means t\xo pudendum muliebre, and the seog is again a variation of seach. This is proved by G 122 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. borrowed the witches, like most else, from the Eomans ; but conceived them in their own fashion, as agents of the devil. The indigenous machinery of the race is ghosts, which are the apparitions natural to conscience and personality. As the witches present the special traits of the Italians, so the ghosts are found to offer a family likeness to the Teutons. They prowl individually, incline to taciturnity, when they speak impart but facts, and these concerning themselves. Thus, Horatio questions the ghost, in Hamlet, upon the vari- ous heads supposed to cause the apparitions : " If there be any good thing to be done, That may to thee do ease and grace to me ; * * * * Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life, Extorted treasure in the womb of earth, For which they say you spirits oft walk in death, Speak of it." Here the conscience is seen at work in the remorse for the plundered treasure. With the Celts, the corresponding creations are the fairies, which accordingly partake of the known characters of the race. They live sociably, and go in companies ; are gay, inoffensive, garrulous ; are too polite or public-spirited to ever talk about themselves, and have no " treasure " but what passes for a proverb of evanescence. Now, as according to the programme, the Celts should, even here, present a methodized conjunction of the produc- tions of the extreme races, it follows that the fairies should the Gaelic or Scotch form of the syllable, which is s6ag (pi-seag), and thus an evident transition. The closest approach to the notion in the Latin is the Una, which denoted both a procuress and witch ; the former being usually women in the state described. 123 partake of the ghost and witch, and in all degrees from mere connection up to main transmutation. This conclusion is estahlished at large in the dissertation. The result throws the light of a strangely profound order on what has been thought hitherto but fancy in Shakespeare. The witches proper, that is, pragmatic and potent through physical means, he scarce employs but in connection with Eomanic scenes or characters. The ghosts, those reflected or negative sides of personality, are still more exclusive to the Teutonic plays. The fairies are equally peculiar to the Celtic. The Midsum- mer Night's Dream, where they constitute the action, is in reality a Celtic play. The critics are unable to find this piece an origin ; they were possibly unwilling, in this as other cases, to look to the Welsh side of Shakespeare's sources of production. In " Cymbeline," the fairies are repeatedly alluded to. It is true, there is also a ghost scene in this piece ; but it is evidently and admittedly a gross inter- polation, extorted by the national avidity for ghosts. 1 A curious attestation to the strictness of the theory. The ghosts in Macbeth had in part a like origin ; but there were also others, though coincident at bottom. Shake- speare found the ghosts of Banquo and his progeny in Boethius ; and they served too well his purpose at once of courting the English taste and complimenting James I., believed a member of this ghostly line, not to neglect the incongruity, even supposing him quite conscious of it. But 1 Schlegel undertakes, however, like a true Teuton, to find a motive for Shakespeare's lowering his style to the level of this grotesque interlude of the stage-players. Moreover, the style is the only incongruity which he Bees in the introduction of the ghosts ! Quite natural, however. 124 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. what proves the incongruity a fact in this case, too, is, that the incident of the ghosts is an addition of Bcethhis, either invented or adopted from English influence by his loose fancy. There is no trace of it in old Wintoun, who gives in detail the whole story. More than this, the mere his- torical existence of Banquo, or of any such person as the son Fleance, is denied by recent antiquaries, George Chalmers among others, who remarks that even the names are fictitious, being not Gaelic. Thus the more primitive and pure tradi- tions exclude the ghosts from Macbeth, though the modified admission is allowed, we saw, by principle. On this prin- ciple it is that the witches, on the other hand, retain this Teuton name and certain of the Italian attributes. For instance, the Eoman Hecate is constituted their directress, by what is still considered an amalgamation of Shakespeare's ignorance. The queer synthesis was more forward in the popular view in Scotland, which organized the witches into agents of the fairies ; as with the Teutons, they were agents of the devil, the prince of ghosts. The Scotch arrangement, well attested by the evidence of courts of judicature, thus presents the Eoman witches passing into the fairies. This, in fine, is the gentilitial character of the Weird Sisters. They are accordingly named quite titularly in publications of Shakespeare's times, " The Three Fairies, or Weird Elves." Their Eoman mistress in Macbeth is made to give them the command : And more about the cauldron sing, Like elves and. fairies in a ring. But Macbeth is made most properly to stamp himself their character, and gives them, not for beings that work evil, like 125 the Roman pitches, or that reveal accomplished but unknown facts, like the ghosts ; hut that discover the " relations" on which depend the dark future : or, as he after defines the weird sisters in terms, " the spirits that know all mortal con- sequences." 1 The "Witches then were an embodiment of Macbeth' s criminal aspirations. The ratiocinative bent appears immedi- ately in his reply to them : — " Stay, you imperfect talkers, tell me more." But more at large, in his meditations on their disclosures, in the next scene. Macb. . . . Two truths are told, As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme. This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill ; cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing with a truth ? I 'm Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion, Whose horrid image doth transfix my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs. Against the use of nature? Present feats Are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murder 's yet but phantasy, Shakes so my single state of man, that function Is smothered in surmise ; and nothing is, But what is not. Act i. sc. 5. Here assuredly is a sample of deliberative reasoning, ' Schlegel objects to Shakespeare's witches that, unlike the Eumenides of Eschylus, they are not, divine ; but " ignoble and vulgar instruments of hell." In the first place, he mistakes, it is perceived, their delegation, and gives them the Teutonic commission. But besides this, the Witches were instructors, whereas the Eumenides were avengers. Which were, then, the more appropriate instruments of hell ? 126 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. whose sharp and succinct tissue yields already a striking con- trast with the vague or mystic rhapsodies of the like nature in Hamlet. It commences with a regular induction, in the opening lines. — The prediction is thus far verified in two instances out of three ; it will prohahly be likewise realized in the remaining. But in this, the realization must be either good or evil. "Were it evil, it could not logically issue from the same principle which has already given two results that are undoubtedly both good and true ; for I, in fact, am Thane of Cawdor and of Glamis, as foretold. The promised royalty must be consequently also true and good. But then, if so, why am I horrified at the condition which it demands ? Why does the idea of the necessary means to an end that is both good and determined by the laws of fate or nature, produce within me a perturbation that deranges the same nature 1 It is that I am of a constitution which is appalled, not by the daring, but by the speculative computation of the means and consequences of the deed. I am so much, indeed, a thing of " thought," that the contemplation of this murder cuts off my consciousness, my vital function, from all inherence in personality, and makes my logical deliberations to me the only real existence. — And never surely has philosopher, not to say poet or metaphysician, characterised more purely the reasoning temper than these closing lines. Without this clew, it is no wonder that the ablest of the commentators utterly mistake the refined import of the passage. Thus the phrase of " single state," on which the argument revolves, and which denotes the mental oneness that excludes divided action, is explained by even Johnson to refer to " the individual, as 127 opposed to the commonwealth or conjunct body, in compa- rison with which Macbeth' s state of mind would be weak and debile" ! In the name of common sense, what has a " commonwealth or conjunct body " to do with either the general tenor or present point of the speaker's thought ? It is not even to the individual state that he alludes at all. The express terms of the text are : " my single state of man :" that is to say, the human state which I hold in common with all mankind. What is peculiar to Macbeth is, that his " thought" annihilates this state. And this it does from both the principle, that the intelligence being indi- visible, cannot be operative at the same time in several directions ; and the practice of his own mind, which travels off into the world of reason, and leaves behind it, as if non-existent, both the personal and the material, to which the intellect in other races attaches concretely its normal " function." But it is idle to discuss criticisms made in utter insuspicion of the principle that animates the personage and play. It is more blameable that mere grammatical correctives have been missed. The lexico- grapher, again, might have obtained the exact import, from a use of the word " single " made soon after, as if on purpose, f All our service," says Lady Macbeth, in paying her respects to the king, " all our service twice done and then done double, were poor and single" etc. ; where single backed by poor means, clearly, slim and indivisible. So, on the principle itself, Macbeth is also made commentator, by a repetition that implies it deep in character : Who can be wise amazed, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment ? No man. 128 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. And again, when his Lady reproves him with : " Be not lost so poorly in your thoughts" he answers : " To unknow myself, 'twere best not know my deed"; a sentiment imply- ing that thought, in him, could find oblivion, not alone of the subjective, but also of the objective, in abstract contem- plation of the relations between them. This ratiocinative disposition to lose the personal in the relational, which is the opposite of the reflexive, that sees the relative but through the personal, is better known in the popular mass of Macbeth's race as imagination. This ruder form is, accordingly, often manifested by Macbeth. A characteristic instance is the monologue with the dagger. This discourse also well exemplifies the special manner of the poet, who makes his personages analyse, instead of acting out the character, and tell aloud the inmost pro- cesses and uncouth details of the thinking, instead of utter- ing but the conventional conclusions, like the classics. Macb. — Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle tow'rd my hand? come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight ? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain f I see thee yet inform as palpable As this which I now draw. Act ii. s. 2. The opposition so finely drawn between vision and feeling, marks precisely the distinction between the muscular and nervous races. To the latter, the reality is in the vision, in the mind. With the former, it is rather in the touch, in the hand ; " to have and to hold " is the axiom of its evidence, as MACBETH. 129 it accordingly is the best worn of the formulas of English law. This contrast is well and wittily adverted to by Prior, respecting the illusions to which " Alma " is liable — North Britons hence have second sight, And Germans free from gun-shot fight. The fact has made its way into set formulas of even the languages. For instance, the French expression which we render " point of view" has for a Germanic equivalent, the characteristic " sfcmcZ-point." And so truly is the muscular and personal sentiment which prompts this vulgar term a parti- cular of race, that it seems to be supplanting the old form with the Americans. In English writers of any character, it does not yet appear. But the use of the other phrase is likewise so rare, that it might be rather rash to claim the absence as due to taste, and not indifference to all logical perspective whatever. The ghost of Banquo, although alien or adventitious to the theme, may have been pressed upon the poet, among the other motives mentioned, by the purpose of employing it as an effect of the same faculty. The distinction between a real and an imaginary ghost, however futile in philosophy, derives importance from the end proposed. To paint the trait of imagination, Macbeth is shown the image of the person he is conscious of having just consigned to murder ; but no one else of a large company, who have no privity or part in it, is made susceptible, with all the host's asseverations, of per- ceiving it. On the contrary, in Hamlet, where this sort of apparition had a relative reality as being, as it were, at home, the ghost, there come to urge the selfishness of the hero to 130 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. right his father, is made quite visible to third parties, and simultaneously, and even first. That this opposition between the vision of imagination and the ghost of conscience, must have existed systematically in the mind of Shakespeare, is well confirmed by Macbeth' s reply to the remonstrance of his lady : — The times bave been That when the brains were out the man would die, And then an end ; but now they rise again With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools ; this is more strange Than such a murder is. Act. ii. sc. 5. Thus he says almost in terms that it is the fact of " strange- ness" that affected his imagination or rather reason, not the crime his conscience. Eather reason, for singularity implies a process of comparison, and there besides is an act of reason in seeing the consequential murders. Nay, the twenty mortal murders are a sorites of sequence, and what fixes his attention, not the putting out the brains. So unequivocal is this con- struction, that he persists in rejoining : " Can such tilings be, and overcome us bike a summer cloud, without our special wonder ? " It is also true to nature that this speculative tendency, is always overborne at the first by the imaginative. At the moment when Macbeth mourns that his early feelings are outworn, that his crimes have made him callous, so that " no direness can longer start him," a messenger is made to enter in a flurry with pallid face, at the mere sight of which the stoic master bursts into fury to drown his feelings. There can be nothing more truly Celtic, or more finely illustrative MACBETH. 131 of the effectual invincibility of organisation in every race. Shakespeare evidently plays upon the nervous temperament of his hero, as on a musical instrument, to give expression to its various tones. Xo less is it in character that Macbeth's frighted fancy, the first fit over, subsides promptly to solid reason for consolation, in the succeeding noble passage, so instinct with the Celtic spirit. The exhibitions of this riper reason are more numerous and normal. Thus when Macbeth mounts the throne : " To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus." Always consider- ing the consequences. He fears the enmity of Banquo, not so much for his valour, as because " he hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour to act in safety." And when his lady, with the rashness of her sex, reproves his musings, saying, that " what is without remedy, should be without regard," the answer is : "We have scotched the snake, not killed it." And to the like effect, the entire subsequent passage, in which he argues that the murder might be deemed a boon to Duncan, in comparison with his own state, in apprehension of the consequences. So, while pondering the murder, he reasons in soliloquy : — If it were done when 't is done, then 't were well It were done quickly; if the assassination Could trammel up the consequences, etc. He puts this bugbear of the " consequences " elsewhere into an axiom : " Things bad, begun, make strong themselves by ill." A striking evidence of this tension of his mind to the means and consequences, is afforded by the exultation of his answer to the wicked monitress, when she suggests the plan of fathering the murder on Duncan's servants : " Bring forth 132 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. men children only ! " And after some further explanations, he concludes : " I am settled" etc. He then sees his way, and in the logic of the means quite loses sight of hoth the courage and the crime of the action. Again, when he is told of the escape of Banquo's son : — Then comes my fit again : I had else been perfect, Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, As broad aud general as the casing air : But now I' m cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in To saucy doubts and fears. Act iii. sc. 5. It is impossible for language to embody more expressively the yearnings of a systematic and ratiocinative intellect, on both the side of satisfaction and aversion at the same time. Every word of the accumulated epithets and images would seem designed, or rather dictated, by this idea or inspiration. So, again, in giving orders for Banquo's murder, he is nice " To leave no rubs and botches in the work." In fine, to the last, and in his death-struggle, he is rational ; for he resolves that he will not die, like the " Boman fool," by his own hand, and "reasoneth" better than the Cato or the Plato of Addison, that while a living foe is around him, " the gash is better placed on them." The vicious excess of this reasoning is as notable as the qualities ; it is, in fact, a spring in the economy of the action. It appears also in several instances alleged of the normal use ; as in, "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly." That is, if the mere deed could be sufficient to insure success, " might be the Be-all and the End-all," Macbeth would act without hesitation. But he MACBETH. 138 must hesitate, because he foresees various consequences of the murder, which would, by rational computation, convert the enterprise into a failure. This refined exigence of precon- certing complete success by condign means, is the great damper to adventure and action generally in the Celts. In the Irish, it remains in the condition called their indolence. Being for ages back accustomed to look upon nothing which they might project, or even actually possess, as within their own arbitrament, the constitutional circumspection had taken refuge in doing nothing ; in evading, by its subtlety and a hand-to-mouth subsistence, the exertion or the industry, whose fruits would only tempt new plunder. The result was, that the very plunderers took, for the listlessness of savages, what was the effect of a reasoning power superior to their own — a reluctance against plodding on, like slaves or beasts of burthen, to drudge and draw, to plant and sow, without a thought for who may reap. In the Scotch, who have been never subjected to this fleecing, and had only to contend with poor resources and a petty State, the quahty has taken the well- known form called their caution. In the French, with whom a scientific discipline is still more forward, this abuse of the reasoning faculty is a bureaucratic mechanism ; that perva- siveness of system and ubiquity of surveillance winch the English put, tout bonment, to the account of despotism : they make the French slaves as they made the Irish savages. The Irish themselves had, in their native institutions, though of course upon a petty and barbarous scale, a mechanism of essentially the same spirit as the French. The Brehon laws are in this aspect without a parallel. For example, in tres- passes, the fines were apportioned according to the species of 134 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. the animal committing them, and perhaps to the age, or even lesser circumstances. So, too, as to the objects sustaining the damage, the different sorts of trees, of lands, of crop. Nothing could he more conclusive of the gentilitial character of what the French term V esprit reglementaire, and which the English abhor, from their incapacity of organization. On the other hand, the French are as grotesque in their English judgments. Nothing is more ludicrous, the two races being understood, than to hear the admiration of the French for " English enterprise." They judge of the preconcertion by their own sense of obstacles, and of the success by the pros- perity of England. Both the fallacies endow the English with an infallible reach of forecast ; a compliment which they accept without examining the gift-horse, but rather forth- with mounting, and riding rough-shod the world over. The truth, however, is, that there is not in that world one community — perhaps not all communities together- — which commits so large a waste, as well of muscle as of money, for want of due concertion and of organized procedure. The prosperity of England is in some sort the result of a concourse as fortuitous as the chaos of Democritus ; the strife for ages of a multitude of individual forces, left to forage through the expanse of the terraqueous globe, and impelled, from almost the very cradle to the grave, in a pursuit, not over- scrupulous, of money alone : there is incalculable waste of power by the crossings and collisions ; myriads are daily trampled down in the scramble ; but as the multitudes embarked are large, and the range of action varied, the positive results must be, even by the law of chances, in proportion. It is these results that, contemplated ab extra by a different MACBETH. 135 race, appear the preconcerted cosmos of English commerce and. English polity. The polypi are held, to have projected the coral island. ~Nov is this character disparaging, but quite the contrary, to the English, It is the genius of the com- mercial and general mission of the race. Commerce, in the larger sense, is a species of gambling. Few adventures would bear the test of rational scrutinity of their contingencies. But such a test must here also be employed by the race^of reasoning, which is one among the causes why it is not a race of com- merce. It must therefore, while awaiting the season of its special faculty, be viewed by even itself in the light of an inferior race. For the judgments of mankind are rudely regulated by success, much rather than the quality of the agency or even the object ; and the object of the English has the further advantage of being nearer to the sympathies of the multitude in all races. But to return to Macbeth, the Scotch degree of this over- caution is well displayed in another of his answers in the same scene. When his reluctance is overcome by the sugges- tion of the means, and he is lashed into enthusiasm by the " tongue-valour" of his lady — who, by the way, is the motive principle, the " spring of action" to Macbeth's "reason" — yet he cannot forbear muttering the hesitation : " If we should fail." So, though assured by bis fatidical authorities, the witches, that he bears a " charmed life," which "none of woman born " can take, he does not think it quite enough, but will go on to " make assurance doubly sure, and take a bond of fate." Another trait of the race in general is well disclosed in his "nighty purposes." In fact, this fickleness, observed more commonly in the French and Irish than in the Scotch, 136 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. results from reasoning, and not its absence, as is the preva- lent reproach. For a race or individual seeing but either ends or motives has slight cause for hesitation, and none at all for variation : and so his ignorance of medial difficulties gets the honour of audacity, and the blind impetus of his design or his desire is perseverance. But in a race whose constitution directs predominantly to the means, which are indefinite in number, and progressive in discovery, the operation of this search, and of this sifting pro and con, must cause the corresponding changes of impression, which seem inconstancy. The case may be illustrated in the newspaper press. What is called freedom of this press is impossible in France until the mass can distinguish solid reasoning from its semblance. An argumentative article has, in a Paris journal, an effect upon the public like a pleading in a court ; that is to say, it influences the sentence, the public conduct. In England, on the contrary, not all the logic of Aristotle, though it were showered through a thousand newspapers, could move a man from his opinion; for this opinion is but a name for his personal interests. Where these are not involved, he may yield to declamation ; he may join in an " excitement " against a ministry or other nuisance ; but if even this sensation should become so top- heavy as to strain him at the roots, he drops back instantly into himself. This is the philosophy of what Napoleon would explain, by saying, the English were trop brutales to be influenced by newspapers. And so faithfully is it acted on, that the most prosperous of their journals makes its policy, not to lead, but to follow and to flatter, and unblusliingly or ostentatiously shifts its principles from week to week : i.",; a curious hut consistent comment on the decried ficklem ss oi the French, -with whom a journal of tins character could not exist for a month. But it is because the French are led in politics by reasoning. Thus an eloquent piece of sophistry may overturn a government. It would be so in Ireland, Li the Irish had their own government. It had been so in Scotland, while the Scotch were independent, and even in the absence of the lever of the newspapers. The moral is, that the .Celtic race derives stability from the Teutonic. The one supplies the structure with the bone and the muscle, which are best to hold the positions in which they once are placed ; the Celts, the nervous medium of organizing and adorning. So that the British empire has the first materials in the world, which need only to be righted into their proper places. In the meantime, to get the Celts to act with energy in doubtful matters, they must not be left to think, but lashed or lauded into enthusiasm. 1 This, in fact, they do themselves, when made quite conscious of the foible. Thus,, the poet who makes Macbeth confess repentently his " flightiness," does not omit to make him resolve that, from that moment, " the firstlings of his heart shall be those of his hand ; " that he will leave no time for the intervention of the head. And again, to the same effect, in a passage variously illus- trative : — The mind I sway by, and the heart I hear, Shall never fag with doubt nor shake with fear. These verbal vauntings of resolution are sometimes hurried 1 Caesar soon observed and often mentions this policy: quibus (Gallis) ad concilia capienda, nihil spatii dandum. G 2 138 NEW EXEGESIS OP SHAKESPEARE. into headlong action. A fine example is presented in the sequel of the previous passage, where he executes the boast, that the hand must follow close the heart, by ordering the useless massacre of Macduff's helpless wife and children, because, through his own ponderings, the father had time to fly. For there is not in the frame of the man who perpe- trates this butchery a single atom of native cruelty or of animosity to the objects ; the thing is simply an atonement to his mortified self-respect, a vindication of his consistency, a satisfaction of his amour propre, as the great wizard of human character who paints Macbeth goes on to intimate : No boasting Mice a fool; This deed I'll do before the purpose cool. In fine, the failing and the quality are set in juxtaposition by Macbeth's own consciousness, in speaking of " the pauser, Reason" 3. The Moral test is, as propounded, the consequences of the action towards the happiness of the actor, and thus the approval of the public ; for the latter is essential to the race of sociability. But such are Macbeth's ethics, as must be seen already. For the " consequences " are the same in this as in the previous article, where they were found the princi- pal pre-occupation of the " pauser." Only there, it was the influence of the facts upon the general result, whereas the moral point of view is their legitimacy individually. But the distinction disappears to the conception of the race of reason, in the same manner as the rules of all practice do in science. For this race, the means and consequences in all MACBETH. 139 walks of human conduct tend to merge into the character of natural laws of the social body. They are the "mortal consequences" known to the Weird Sisters. The -better mode then of conceiving the moral system of Macbeth is by regarding it in opposition to, and thus preclusive of, the test of conscience. This is, doubtless, a bold proposition at the outset. Of the thousand of Shakespeare's commentators, whether native or even foreign, there has never been, perhaps, one who so much as imagined that the principle of conscience was not a main-spring of this character. Coleridge, among the latest, talks of Macbeth, as having " recoilings and whispers of conscience;" terrors of remorse ; " being " cowsc/ewce-stricken even to moral death," and other rantings of the sort. Even Schlegel does not fail to endow him with a conscience. In feet, Wintoun himself had made a like attribution ; but his chronicle was written in the days of Saxon intercourse. Now, if Shakespeare has excluded it, in face of the tradi- tions to which he has so faithfully adhered in most else, it is an argument additional that he was led by a firm purpose. But a remarkable particular to that effect is forthwith offered. It is, that through the tempting compass of this tragedy of horrors, the name itself of conscience does not once occur, in either of the chief characters, or even in any whatsoever. The fiendish heroine alone makes one allu- sion to even " remorse," and not as actually experienced, but as something merely possible. But, moreover, her mean- ing in the word is simply pity, as frequently elsewhere in the language of this poet ; and as shewn by the cause which she adds for the feeling — the famous " compunctious visitings 140 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. of nature ;" of nature, remark, and not of conscience. Nor can it be .surmised that the poet yielded to a stress of metre, as the latter of the terms would answer this as well. So that the choice of the expression and exclusion was quite deliberate. A substitution no less crucial, occurs in Macbeth' s own words, where he says — For Banquo's offspring have I filed my mind. To file or defile the conscience, would be the English locu- tion. "When, therefore, Shakespeare in a monologue, not only does not use this form, but selects language so anoma- lous as to defile by crime the intellect, he must have certainly intended that the speaker should be viewed as of a character in which the mind is the proper conscience or moral touch- stone. So, no other test is hinted in the sole equivocal expres- sions, the sounds that ring in Macbeth's ears on perpetration of the murder, the reiterated : " sleep no more ! Macbeth shall sleep no more ! This is partly the recoil of a senti- mental temperament, as is attested by the fine eulogy that accompanies it upon sleep. It was that echo of the irre- callable which the same refrain of " no more " used to excite in the eminently Celtic temperament of De Stael, and also in Byron's, for instance where he exclaims : — No more, no more, oh ! never more my heart, etc. But there besides was, beneath the sentiment, a real sub- stance in Macbeth's mind. And what it was is shewn expressly on the juncture above referred to, where he speaks of the defilement of his mind for Banquo's offspring, and proceeds to say : — MACBETH. 141 For them the gracious Duncan I have murdered : Put rancours in the vessel of my peace. Act iii. sc. 2. Here is the textual explanation of the " sleep no more " ; and the destroyer of the sleep and of the "peace" is no remorse, but simply rancours, which are of opposite, that is, external provention. And what the rancours again are, Macbeth himself had fully specified, where he enumerated the dissuasives from his commission of the murder ; which were : the natural and social laws of kindred, the duties of loyalty and hospitality, and especially the virtues, royal and personal, of Duncan ; which would all plead before the world " trumpet-tongued " against him, and cover Mm (by con- sequence) with public enmity and execration. He even lays down the general law of this procession of events, in the memorable image of that "even-handed justice which returns the ingredients of our poisoned chalice to our own lips." So that all sanction or suggestion regarding Con- science, by name or notion, could not be possibly more nicely negatived, were the exclusion systematic. And so it was, some adroit critic may oppose to the correction ; but for a reason quite the contrary of that con- tended for by the argument. Macbeth is made (it may be fancied) by an exquisite refinement, to abstain studiously, or rather timorously, from allusion to the dread tribunal, through an endeavour to dissemble to himself its judgment upon his crimes. — But beside that the psychology were rather Coleridgian, such a motive could not bear upon the secondary personages, who are equally reserved respecting Conscience in even Macbeth. To come, however, to the •mere point and the most peremptory answer, the same poet 142 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. should be presumed, then, to give this conscience-smitten abstinence to one whose murders are still more numerous, and horrible than even Macbeth' s. Does, therefore, Eichard III. dare to ever speak of conscience ? Why, it is a main topic with him, public and private. "When, after murdering two or three of his kings, apparent or actual, he is offered by his own subornation the crown, he accepts it, " against my conscience and my soul." The night before the fatal battle, on disappearance of the ghosts, he exclaims to himself : " coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me !" And on the morrow the same man recurs again to this pliant monitor, in exhortation of his staff, who had been simi- larly goaded : — Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe. Our strong amis be our conscience, swords our law. Act v. sc. 6. It is that Eichard and his fellow personages appertain to the race of Conscience. Here is strikingly seen the syste- matic insight of Shakespeare. He farther shews, as if on purpose, the convenient versatility, along to contradiction, proved above to mark this principle. He even indicates its real purport : " to keep the strong in awe ;" and its conse- quent appropriateness, as noted also, to soldier races. For, apprehending no law less physical than their " strong arms," and their " swords," and quite incapable of following any consequence of their abuse, the sole access for the oppressed to the weak reason of these men of muscle is providentially supplied by this debility itself, as it enables the religious or other intellectual class to scare and manage them through the MACBETH. 143 suggestions and the shadows of their very selfishness. And still in keeping, the great poet depicts his Norman malefactor as visited by the forebodings, not of witches, but of ghosts. So with Henry VIII., who murders wife after wife, and yet has the same conscience incessantly upon his lips, with the variety that in him it is the cause of the murders. 1 In fine, as conscience was with Hamlet a maker of cowards, and by the process just revealed to us by Shake- speare himself, so Macbeth was made a coward by calcula- tion, that is, by consequences. The quintessence of this rational and social ethics of the Celtic race is presented in a single and a celebrated line, of which Johnson, though he could have seen but little of its full significance, has justly said that it alone would have made Shakespeare immortal. It is the answer of Macbeth to the truly Celtic stimulants of cowardice and unnianliness with which his lady taunts him : — I dare do all that may become a man; Wbo dares do more is none. The word "become" is here the cardinally Celtic term; not " man," as it was viewed by the great moralist of per- sonality. The vices also of this moral standard are observable in Macbeth. They turn duely on the end, whether personal or public. For the means, the media, the relations of the action being the natural and thus legitimate criterion with this 1 Conscience is appealed to in Eichard III. thirteen times ; in Henry V. fourteen times ; in Henry VIII. twenty-two times ; and so of the other Teutonic plays. 144 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. race, tile abuse lies in relapsing to the motives or the end; which principles being without vital foundation in the organism, turn easily to the services of passion or hypocrisy. So in the race of personality, the ordinary depravation con- sists in looking to the end, which in them must be the self ; whence that habitual by- play of spontaneous hypocrisy between selfishness and conscience, between practice and preaching, which is so familiar and famous by the name of English cant. So in fine, in the Italians, the demoralizing tendency lies in turning from the end to the motives or the means ; for then the end becomes the rule by which to judge of the means, without regard to the appropriate laws or nature of the latter; is made to "justify" them, in the technical expression of the maxim. So exquisite is the con- formity in the derangements as well as functions of this moral mechanism of European society! A society which, however, is confessedly as unconscious of it as the savage is of the analogous machinery that works within him ; nay, which holds through its highest moralists a notion on the subject, which, though natural in the case, is in principle more monstrous — more opposed to the whole organic conditions of the universe — than the most grovelling imbecilities of Negro fetichism. Eor such is the assumption of a uniform test, a moral fiat or a dead level that would actuate all these races ; and would be as if a rail-car were constructed all of wheels, a ship of masts or steam-engines, a watch of springs or indicators. And this, while it is come, of recent years, to be admitted, that society is an organism of incal- culably higher complexity. The Celtic race, then, in declining from its proper moral MACBETH. 145 standard, falls over into either personality or patriotism. It makes either of these the pretexts, even to itself, of all crime. It will compensate its own conscious holloAvness of the principles by exaggerated displays of vaunting or of violence. It will guillotine a nation for the love of the nation. And if self become the principle, it will proclaim, instead of practising it ; to the opposite of the Teuton, who practises while decrying it : it will be what a Celtic king- has Avell and wittily remarked of a kinsman still more Celtic — a fanfdron de crimes. Thus Macbeth, when he resolves to reconsult the weird sisters on the "danger to be dreaded from the rivalry of Banquo, " is bent to know by the worst means, the worst, for my own good." And when he afterwards despatches assassins to waylay him : — But let both worlds disjoint 1 and all things suffer, Ere we will eat our meal in fear, etc. When he presents himself for counsel a second time to the Witches : — Though you untie the winds and let them fight Against the churches ; though the yesty waves Confound and swallow navigation up, etc. though the treasure Of nature's germins tumble all together, Even till destruction sicken ; answer me. Act iv. sc. 2. 1 Shakespeare may have here committed no anachronism. The doctrine of antipodes, inhabiting an under world— a hemisphere that might seem liable to drop off into the void — had been taught some two centuries before the time of Macbeth, by his Irish kinsman, Saint Yirgilius. H 146 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. Here is a fine sample of the fanfaronade of a selfishness that has no real root in the character, a mere ebullition of desperation in a man, who, finding he has forfeited the public approbation, and in it lost his sole campass of morality, renounces all. A really selfish man would never have proclaimed a word of this ; it might not even have occurred to him that any stipulations, even the ruin of a world, need be thought of, against his interests. In the circumstances of Macbeth, he would fall back upon himself ; would retire like a Teuton into the " castle" of his conscience, and, turning round upon the world, set to hurl on it from the battlements, the arrows of his virulence and the chamber- pots of his abuse. What does Hamlet 1 So fully was this gentilitial view in Shakespeare's mind, that even the vulgar assassins of Banquo, just alluded to, are made to offer to Macbeth this trait of their common race as the best gtiarantee for their immoral fidelity. 1st Murd. — I am one whom the vile blows and buffets of the world have so incensed, that lam reckless what 1 do to spite the world. 2d Murd. — And I another, so weary with disasters, tugged with fortune, that / ivoidd set my life on any chance to mend it, or be rid on't. This deperation of personality, this counterfeited selfish- ness, is the less common of the two declensions into vice, as the less congenial ; for the Italian standard of the family or the country is far nearer, than the individual, to the social and the human. The greater danger of moral lapsion is, there- fore into patriotism. It is the fault which Edmund Burke denounced so eloquently and so ignorantly, as " the spirit of metaphysical, undefoecated evil," in the French T? olutionists, MACBETH. 147 who looked so callously on all their massacres, because they saw them, not through consciences, but through the conse- quences to the nation. 1 4. The test of the Philosophy, as designated in the programme — systematic, rationalistic, unreligious — is also Macbeth' s. An example of the methodizing appeared in the Introduction, where he suggested, through the breeds of dog, the mode of classifying human races ; there was here alone the germ of a social philosophy. The rationalistic character takes most the form of fatality. jSTot, however, the theological fatality of the East, nor, on the other hand, the metaphysical fatality of blind accident. The fate of Macbeth, as of his race, is an organical necessity ; the work- ing of a system of " relations" not understood by him. Hence his confidence in the agents who do, as he thinks, understand them ; his consultation of " the spirits that know all mortal consecpiences." So instinctive is this confidence that he inclines, in his perplexities, to fold his arms and give his projects to the stream of these fatal consequences. In relucting against the murder which he sees to be imphed in the accession to the throne of Duncan predicted Mm by the witches, he resignedly suggests : " If chance will have me 1 The last speech Lord Mansfield ever made in Parliament, began with tbese words : — " Every man who is called upon to consider a great measure should begin at the end — in other words, before he adopts it, should consider the consequences that will probably flow from it." And then the Scottish Celt, no less characteristically, substitutes for the Roman cui b'ono, the rule cui malo. The latter is, in fact, at once the motto of the race, and the mainspring of the whole dramatic hesitancy of Macbeth. 148 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. king, why, chance may crown me without my stir." Here is evidently meant no accident, but on the contrary, a fixed system, both consistent with itself, and independent of all volition. And again, in the same spirit of abandonment : — Come what may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day." So elsewhere, he invokes this philosophic fate to " champion him." And how essentially his fortitude depended on this faith, is avowed when Macduff tells Mm of Ms own Caesarian birth, and his consequent exception to the promise of the fates, that Macbeth could be prejudiced by no man " of woman born." The announcement, he declares, "hath cowed his better part of man" ; that is to say, the intellectual prop on which he leant. Those who understand the race know how deeply this fatality — this organic feeling of a fixed order in the universe — is ingrained in its texture, as a sentiment as well as science. The " indolence " aforesaid of the wretched Irish peasantry has often been ascribed to it, by English perspicacity. The primitive Irish named their country the " Island of Destiny" And the famous corona- tion-stone of both the Irish and the Scottish kings maintained, in spite of Christianity, the following inscription : — Ni fallal Fatum, Scoti, quocunque locatum Invenient lapidem, regnare tenentur ibidem. The trait of irreligion is and ought to be but negative, a mere elimination by superior rationality. For religion, in the traditional or in the conscientious sense, is inversely propor- tional to the degree of reason ; with the predominance of this faculty, it fades into philosophy. Hence the apothegm that uu brought already an imputation of pantheism upon the philosopher of the race of Reason, Seotus-Erigena ; who was undoubtedly the first of men to anticipate this last of truths — that " true religion is philosophy, and true philosophy is religion." Hence, in history, the Gallicanism that came to check the Eoman religion, through the logic and the genius of Arnaud, Pascal, Bossuet, and others. Also, the Calvinism, akin in principle as in author, which opposed its noble " Institutes " to the disorders of the " Conscience," and was adopted through an instinct of race by the Scotch, despite the menaces and the temptations of a form nearer home. For Presbyterianism is but Macbeth" s fatality, with the addition of the rigorism which is inherent in theology. It is, throughout, the same spirit of the race of nervous predominance, that sacrificed its criminals to Hessus in the woods of Gaul ; that adopted the umbrageous grandeur and unbending sternness of the oak as the physical emblem of this the native impersonation of Society ; and that after, on receiving from the other races the Christian dogmas, would also chain down the Almighty himself to the laws of logic — from having been the mere scape-goat of "private judgment " or of " special providence," Macbeth makes scarcely more allusion to formal religion than to conscience. He speaks of having given, by the murder of Duncan, " his eternal jewel to the common enemy of man." But the allusion is among a list of grievances he seeks to amplify, and the expression of " eternal jewel" hints well the emphasis of hollow form. A French Voltairian would not style otherwise the same treasure in our own day." Macbeth accordingly had said already, that he would 150 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. "jump the life to come," if lie could only secure the present against the consequences of his crime. And, elsewhere, in the same tone, so unmistakably Celtic, he asks ironically the assassins whom he is tempering to murder Banquo, if they are possibly so " gospelled " as to scruple to slay their tyrant. Nor is it that Macbeth was not a Christian and a Catholic. He even made a pilgrimage — by proxy — to Borne. And it is deeply worth remarking to the purport of the argument, that while the visits of several dozen Teutonic monarchs to the Christian capital have been remembered, but for quaint penances, or lavish presents to the Pope — even as their heathen ancestors had gone for some- thing different — the sole oblations of this Celtic criminal are found commemorated in the chronicles to be the large sums of money which he had distributed to the poor : argentum seminando pauperibus. At home also he is admitted, for example by Wintoun, to have illustrated his reign at the outset, and only later to have become a tyrant. The real state of the case was this : He gave the first years to the work of conciliation, both at Borne, as has been seen, and much more of course at home : so far he seemed to all an excellent king. But after he found himself thus conso- lidated on the throne, he elevated his attention from per- sonal interests to the public. He was the first to compile a sort of digest of the laws, and projected an incipient organi- zation of the kingdom. Every step in this direction pressed upon the lawless chieftains ; they turned to conspire, and Macbeth to crush them. Thus he was a tyrant for being able to keep his ground, and brave enough to die at last in its defence. It is precisely the same part as has been 151 played in modern times towards the unfortunate Stuart family, his successors of the same race. When these too would maintain the unity which is the genius of the race, they were murdered, dethroned, "banished by a Gothic oligarchy. And as they did not all fall with the bravery of Macbeth, the generous writers of their own country add to tyrant the name imhecile. For such are the alternatives of men in that predicament ; the latter, if they leave them- selves exposed to their enemies ; the former, if they triumph or fall in the endeavour. Witness Napoleon III. The extreme tendency of the philosophy which offers gradually those three aspects, is the disposition to view, under pressure of great calamities, human sufferings with mirth, and life itself as hut a comedy — in short to laugh or to scoff, where the Teuton would pray or execrate. The jests unto the gibbet of the nohle Sir Thomas More would, irrespective of his name, and his repugnance to the Teuton religion, and of his authorship of the Utopia, evince him to have "been a Celt. 1 ibid this, although the gaiety be a result at least negative of the feebleness of the religious instinct : for More died for honour and for institution, as much as religion. The recklessness was common among the French of the days of Terror. It "breaks out constantly in Macbeth, in his paroxysms of dejection. Thus when he either really feels or would display excessive grief on the announcement by Macduff of the murder of Duncan, the expression is, " From this instant there is nothing serious in mortality, all Is lad toys.'''' And afterwards, when overwhelmed by the multi- 1 He was of Irish extraction. See Memoirs, by his grandson. London. 1727. 152 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. plying consequences, lie compares his living tortures with the tranquillity of his victim : " Duncan is in his grave ; after life's fitful fever he sleeps well." But this peculiar blending of the moralistic and the melancholy, the sarcastic and the solemn, the profound and the precise, which marks the Celtic philosophising, appears most striking in the fine strain whereinto Macbeth falls spontaneously, on being apprized of the death of his Lady : — She would have died hereafter ; There would have been a time for such a word. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow Creeps in this petty pace from clay to day, To the last syllable of recorded time ; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life's but a walking sliadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more : it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Act v. s. 5. What loftiness of tone ! what intensity of scorn ! How opposite to the rancorous rant of Hamlet, on like occasions, whose acerbity proceeds at bottom from a sentiment of regard, or having taken things for what they seemed, and found them cross his private humours. -5. The Manners of Macbeth are no less opposite, and thus in character. Throughout the indurating series of his murders and misadventures, he does not utter a single accent of brutality or even cruelty. He shews the vigilant aversion of a refined instinct to the thins- in others. When the MACBETH. 153 murderer of Banquo comes to tellhini of the welcome result, but does it coarsely by saying : " My Lord, his throat is cut, / did that for Mm" the philosopher and gentleman returns the cutting eulogy : "Thou art the best of cut-throats." The refinement of Macbeth's nature is indeed a lever throughout the action, But it is only a co-effect with the main occasion of his hesitation, the reasoning temper, which proceeds like it from predominant nervosity. Macbeth himself describes this temperament in the following among other passages : The time has been, my senses would have cooled To hear a night-shriek, and my fall of hair ' "Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As if life were in 't. Act v. s. 5. This nervous delicacy is well disclosed in the very slightness of the qualities which he recurs to in even his victim with sympathetical regret. It is the " meekness with which he bore himself;'' it is "the gracious Duncan" — a term there employed descriptively, not ceremoniously as now ; it is the man with whose extinction " all renown and grace are dead." There is no finer touch in Shakespeare than the painting of this impression ; and nothing short of his own similarly gentle and genial character could have enabled to seize a trait at once so delicate and deep. A coarse nature in either the poet himself or in the personage 1 This may shew the minute care of the portraiture of Shakespeare. The Celts have everywhere deserved the epithet which Homer gives the Greeks, of "long-haired," both as having it abundant and wearing it loose. The Teutons, who, like perhaps all the muscular races, had it scant, either wore it cropt or top-knotted like the Indians. Unfits crinis et coactus in nodum apud Germanos, says Seneca. 154 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. could not have even thought of, or would despise, such things in royalty. What, accordingly, does Hamlet eulogize in the like predicament? or rather, what is it the same poet conceives, that even Hamlet's mother should, with higher sexual delicacy, have regretted in the father ? Why, nothing- deeper or more refined than " Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself, an eye like Mars to threaten and command ;" all muscular and military, finical and ferocious. In fine, this feature of Macbeth's character is what his Lady would stigmatize by the expression : " being too full of the milk of human kindness." As to the race which Macbeth typifies, these traits of kindliness and politeness are too familiarly characteristic of it to require enforcement. The French section are long the "paragon of nations" for ton ton; and even the Scotch a British King has called a " nation of gentlemen." It should, however, be remembered that George IV. had despotic instincts, and spoke perhaps in tacit contrast with the honest bluntness of his English subjects. The Irish people are so dwarfed and so distorted by long oppression that they have lost the elevation to give dignity to manners ; but the delicacy lies intact beneath the rags of the coarsest peasant. There is not a more striking spiritual contrast in all humanity than is presented by the Irish and the English of this class. The former, even after long residence in London, can never bring themselves, for instance, on being asked a direction, to answer barely and without stopping, in the manner of the English ; they will post themselves before you with a face of respectful interest, and break the answer by some ceremonious or circumlocutory phrases, (a habit which shews the English MACBETH. 155 their unfitness for "business"). With the Englishman, on the contrary, if he happens to do more than answer gruffly without stopping, and perhaps -without looking, it will be to ask, in turn. The day is hot or cold, and he would " like a glass of ale, master." He cannot conceive why he should do one even this service without being paid for it ; whereas the service would be a reason with the neediest Irishman against asking. Even when there is no service, when no object or way is indicated, the manners are still the same. In the suburbs of London, especially on Sundays, one is met by a succession of prowling mendicants, in the shape of full-grown men, comfortably dressed, and of a burliness that does no dis- paragement to " John Bull," who accost you with : " I would trouble you," or at the highest pitch, " I would thank you for a few coppers." You have there the unsophisticated essence of the race ; and it is impossible not to reflect that a Spaniard can rob, with far more civility than an Englishman can beg. Of this division too, the noble Spanish nation, better understood in England in Shakespeare's clay than at the present, the great dramatist has left us a portrait no less noble. It occurs in the person of Don Armado, in " Love's Labour Lost." The King of Navarre is speaking to his fellow-students : Our Court, you know, is haunted With a refined traveller of Spain, A man in all the world's new fashions planted, That hath a mint of phrases in Ms hrain : One whom the music of his own vain tongue Doth ravish like enchanting harmony ; 156 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. a man of complements, whom right and wrong Have chosen umpire of their mutiny. This child of fancy, that Armado hight, For interim to our studies shall relate. In high-born words, the worth of many a knight From tawny Spain, lost in the world's debate. Here, in fact, is a full-length figure, not alone of the Spanish nation, but of the whole Celtic race, in its most marked characteristics. The refinement of manners, the avidity for news and the interest in human concerns the world over, the conversational self-complacency, the inexhaustible elocu- tion, the fertility of fancy, the chivalry of subject — all this is so notorious of the race as to be made its ridicule. But what, until the present theory, was doubtless known alone to Shakespeare, is the grand feature which is hit off in the lines transcribed in capitals. A more profoundly glorious compliment was never paid -to race or nation. In fact the Celts, as the rational and organizing member, the regulator of the extreme races in "the European system, are most happily characterized as a race of " complements," of com- pensations, of adjustment of contending sides, of arbitra- tion between right and wrong. How the poet came to seize this profound philosophic truth, in an age when the Spanish nation, though indeed at the head of Europe, was described to him as a tyrant in both the Old World and the ISTew, is extremely hard to conceive. The least improbable solution is a local perversion of Spanish history in the country invaded by the Armada, besides the general reaction provoked by Charles Fifth against that universal unity which is the mission of the Celts. But besides seeing behind this MACBETH. 157 clamour, an observer like Shakespeare might be aided in- ductively by certain facts in his own country. With all the prejudice of race, all the calumny of policy, and the rancour of wrong-doers against those they are conscious of having outraged, there was not perhaps one Englishman who, up to the time of Shakespeare, -wrote about the Irish people in either books or official documents, who does not dwell with especial emphasis, in some cases with enthusiasm, on their love for what Macbeth terms " even-handed justice." And nothing is more certain than the fact of the trait. An Irishman can never use his appetites as arguments, nor even his prejudices, if he be convinced of them. It is what makes discussion and conversation with the French so charming. You may be always sure, by means of fair argument, of reaching some conclusion with even a peasant : their very term for conversation means allegation of causes (causer). But to sit down before a yeoman, a country- gentleman, or a cockney, and try to batter him by reasoning, were no bad image of the burlescjue. It is true, Shakespeare knew but little of the Celtic race by name, and the connec- tion of the Irish with it was not then suspected ; but it was well known that the Spanish claimed the Irish as descendants. But who should think that this " man of complements," of universal equity, whom Right and Wrong themselves have, alike, chosen as their umpire, should be interpreted by the critics to this day as a petit maitre. The " complements " is printed, or at least rendered, compL'ments, and Don Armado turned from a judge into a popinjay. 1 Thus is 1 The latest edition says merely : "compliments, for accomplishments.''' 158 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. travestied, through, ambiguity of a single letter, the nohlest . sentiment in even Shakespeare. For his critics are men of letters, occasionally of words, hut rarely of a larger compass than a clause, or at most, a sentence. Otherwise, the follow- ing and explanatory phrase — the function of arbitration between right and wrong — must have been seen to consort oddly with a man of silly ceremony. Moreover, the poet repeats the image elsewhere, in speaking of right and wrong : "Between whose endless jar justice presides" 1 And even the term also, as where Iago speaks of not disclosing " the figure of his heart in complement extern" ; a passage like- wise, to this day, both read and printed the rankest non- sense. From ignorance of this grade there seems no other refuge, in the case of Don Armado, than an envy still more despicable. In conclusion, it must be owned, with all its faults, that the Celtic race is, among the known varieties of the species, the race of gentlemen} And this in fact is a moral conse- 1 Trail, and Cressid. 2 It is a striking example of the feeble advances which the mind as yet has made in enlarged national observation, that this trait, wbich is a prime characteristic of the Celts, should have not only been objected to the genuineness of Ossian's poems, but the objection have remained still unremoved, as it does. For even Graham, who has well enough ex- posed, in all the rest, the merely physical or microscopic pedantries of Laing, can do here but plead the accidental nature of national manners, and the consequent inconclusiveness of arguments from analogy against the alleged state of such manners in a given case : an answer that effec- tually threw the proof upon the poems themselves, and fell into the fallacy of begging the question. It was the opposite extreme to the assumption of the objectors. These supposed that the manners of all nations must be like, in their similar degrees of civilization or barbarism, 159 quence from its physical organization, and also a prime requisite of its social destination. It is a consolation that ought to be allowed it ; for the quality has gone for much in the history of its sufferings, and remains still an element and above all, that no people could, in anything commendable, have possibly transcended the Teutons in particular ; -while the reply of Dr. Graham went to deny the likeness of even the same people, at successive epochs. And the fallacy on this side, to say truth, was more to blame. The assailants, being all Teutons, were scarce competent in the question, even organically, and independently of jealousy and policy. How should they have exerted a power of abstract re-creation (which is not at the best supposed to be among their gifts) in conceiving the character of a people 2000 years ago, of whom, notoriously, they have the crudest notions at this day, as they live and act before them, fellow-subjects and French neighbours ? To the champions of the poems, who were most of them Celts, the opposite sympathy of race was, on the contrary, an advantage. Yet, for want of something like the philosophic clew now furnished, they granted the analogy assumed by the attack — whereas the true relation of the races was opposition — and then, to shirk the consequences, fell to common place or sophistry. This cardinal objection of the Ossianic controversy ought to be succes- sively considered under two aspects : the intrinsic or negative, and the external or positive. On the first it might be argued, that the a, b, c of such forging lies in copying the manners supposed natural to the epoch ; and that therefore the unnaturalness found in those of Ossian goes, not for, but against the imputation of forgery. But perhaps, it was meant that Macpherson was so stupid as to have overlooked this rudimental adaptation ? No, for he was known to have attended to it so nicely, as to have changed a word or two to obtain a date ; so that lie strained at the gnat while said to swallow the camel. Besides, how should a writer or how should a poem so ignorant or destitute of the first requisite of art, have extorted and maintained the admiration of Europe? Grant, how- ever, these anomalies and contradictions, all. But where, then, did Macpherson find the manners in question, to influence him unconsciously against both art and nature? Was it in his native Highlands? No, exclaim the oljectors, the Highlanders were savage, and that is just our 160 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. of its inaptitudes and weakness. This, however, cannot shield it from exposure of its vices, as Shakespeare has not failed to paint them in the conduct of Macbeth. proof d fortiori for a date far earlier. Was it in the Lowlands, then, or London itself, or from the visit of its princely representative, " the Butcher Cumherland"? To the modelship of England they would doubtless agree. But even making them a present of a century's refinement, are the sentiments of England, as proclaimed through her press, for the last two years, towards the Indian and Chinese peoples, whom she has gone to massacre and plunder on their own soil — are they the sentiments of equity, generosity, humanity, ascribed by Macpherson to the personages of his poem ? It would be curious to see the face of even a Cockney who durst say so. In fine, then, did Macpherson only draw from himself? No,' once more, for Dr. Johnson pronounced him a " ruffian," and even Hume said he might be civilised by the Cherokees. The conclusion thus resulting from this exhaustive process, leaves the manners to beibund but in the original poems, and to be held, in fact, a crucial attestation of their genuineness — their genuineness in essence, not the actual aggregation. But though this result would have sufficed to demolish the objection, it could not have accounted for the strangeness of the manners, or carried back the poems to any special era. The burthen of disproof would, how- ever, have been thrown upon the parties calling either in question. But there is now no need of this polemic rigour. The affirmative of both the points has been established in the text, by showing- the manners to be normal in the Celts as a nervous race. To this should be annexed the second class of considerations, distinguished as external or positive. They are furnished by the history of this people throughout Europe, from the courtly Castilian through the Frenchman to the Irish peasant, and from the earliest certain knowledge of them down to the present day. Who does not see in the fact, so often mentioned by Caesar, of the prone- ness of his fierce Gauls to fall to weeping like women, the same tempera- ment that Ossian depicts in Cathmor, when he compares him, going in tears from his lover away to battle, to a " rock over whose face the streamlet trickles." An image whose sublime simplicity was never equalled by even Homer. MACBETH. KU This foible will be most familiar to British readers in what is termed Scotch "sycophancy" and French "insin- cerity." It is curious that Shakespeare was enabled already But more pointedly to the manners of the ages assigned the poems is the complete correspondence with the ancient Irish poetry. And though this should he no older, as is urged, than tbe middle ages, or be the same poetry, the argument remains ; for if not from tradition, it then painted from actual sentiment, in times when the same critics say the Irish were as barbarous. Yet they scarcely ever mention the fiercest of their heroes, and Finn himself, their Achilles, but as the man " of mild renown.'' the " king of smiles and courtly grace," etc. Miss Brooke in her excellent translations, remarks it, saying: " He is scarce ever mentioned without some epithet of amiable attraction, such as the majestic— the graceful— the courteous— the generous — the gentle— the smiling — son of Comhal." Nor is it Finn alone, but most the others in their specialities. Thus, in the poem called "Magnus'' : — Mild Fergus then, his errand done, Keturned with wonted grace ; His mind, like the unchanging sun, Still beaming in his face. Another image tbat really surpasses the Homeric, because conveying, unlike them, a moral meaning beneath the physical. Ho again of < raul Mac Morni: — Champion in our cause to arm ! Tongue ivith eloquence to charm ! With depth of sense and reach of manly thought; With every grace and every beauty fraught ; Can sjjch qualities of mind and morals be pointed out elsewhere in the heroic creations of a barbarous people ? The manners, then, of ( Asian's poems are now comprehensible; as are also the divine Shakespeare's ''gracious Duncan," the man with whom "all renown and grace arc- dead. " The Irish poems, on tbe contrary, describe the Scandinavians by the epithets " dire," " dark," " gloomy'' ; without moral praise or blame, as ii 2 162 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. to observe the two characters, and even contrast them with the English. The group is presented in " The Merchant of Venice," where Portia is asked what she thinks of her Scotch suitor. The answer is, that " He hath a neighbourly charity in him ; for he borrowed a box of the ear of the Englishman, and swore he would pay him again when he teas able : I think the Frenchman became his surety, and sealed under for another." In this sly patience of the sufferer, the muscu- larity of the offence, the diplomacy of the guarantee, what a picturesque epitome, not only of the manners, but also of the politics, at that day, and even still, in a certain sense, of the three nations ! The question is not, here, if the re- proaches be fully founded. It is sufficient that they inspired Shakespeare, in drawing the conduct of Macbeth. In fact, this person is found accordingly prescribing to his fellow- criminal, to " make their faces vizards to their hearts." And the lady, too, appears not much in need of the instruction ; she is frequently herself, indeed, the mouitress of the art. Reminding the husband how to flatter his new court, she says : " The sauce to meat is ceremony ; meeting were bare without it." And again, in a maxim worthy of the pro- foundest of the ancient cynics : to beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue ; look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under 't. Act. i. sc. 7. if they felt them brute animals. And in sooth, were the polar bears and wolves to make an Edda, it could scarce be more devoid of all mental and moral reference, more exclusively engrossed witb carnage, voracity and vulgarity, than the celebrated Grandmothers' Tales of the North. MACBETH. 163 " To beguile," that is, deceive, or in meeter language, A - the age you live in, the world, around you, seem at its level, or rather lower. The axiom thus developed has no limit in general life ; and is so true that the reality of the resemblance does as well, as the hypocrisy though aided by the covert guidance of better intellect. There is a sympathy of medio- crity and a conformity of imbecility which no mere actor upon the public can quite seduce or supply. But to return to the subject, Macbeth himself declares, again : Away, I mock the time with fairest show ; False face must hide what the false heart doth know.' ■j. In fine, the phase of Sociability is the most signal of all the consonances. It unfolds, indeed, the cause of the crimes of Macbeth. Yet it is also the fountain of his " milk of human kindness," and is developed by the lady in the sequel of this passage : Thou 'would 'st he great, Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it. What thou would'st highly That thou would'st holily; would'st not play false, And yet would'st wrongly win. Thou 'dst have, great Glamis, That which cries : " This thou must do, if thou have it " ; And that's what rather thou dost fear to do, Than wishest should be undone. Act i. sc. 7. In this admirable sketch, wherein the poet no doubt intended to introduce Macbeth as viewed by one who knew him best — just as he early in the play of Hamlet sketched this hero through the uncle — in this portraiture there is a compound confirma- tion of most the tests ; of the rational, the physical, and moral, 164 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. as well as social. The whole antithesis, however, revolves upon the moral, upon the opposition between the end and the means ; the latter being the obstacle, as moral standard of the race, and the end an alien guide that lures this race into immorality. Until the theory of these pages had brought all this to system, it was quite obviously impossible to have a distinct comprehension of the oracular condensation and contrasts of this passage. It can now be analysed with complete logical precision. Macbeth by constitution looks to great and high ends ; but he will not obtain them by means that are unworthy. He would not object to them for coming within his reach by the means of foul play in others ; but he cannot himself be the false player. He will even yield so far as to like to be told how it is that the requisite false play may be executed ; and he shrinks from this naked indication of the means, more through fear of the consequences than through scruple at the commission. In other words, he is no puritan of either sanctity or conscience ; he would accept the end as an accomplished fact, without caring to examine how it came into his hands ; of this he leaves the responsibility to the arrange- ments of fate or nature. But if this fate will not come to " crown him," if the mountain will not come to Mahomet, if it be requisite to gain it through intervening swamps of slaughter ; then his reasoning power is busy in calling up a thousand obstacles ; his sentiment of honour is revolted at the ignominies ; the exquisiteness of his nerves excites the tremulousness of a coward in one who, stayed by approving reason, would have the bravery of a lion. He lingers on the bank in admiration of the lofty aim ; he consults auguries or L65 fairy-witches to know if " chance " may not dispense him from the danger and the drudgery of wading through the mire of crime ; in this direction he will not stir, unless pushed in hy a foreign hand — to the extent at least of soil- ing Ins feet and shaming his fears. This event becomes a first consideration on the side of action, and co-operates with the attraction of the object to draw him on. The same reason and self-esteem, that barred his entrance on the course, pass, in proportion as he advances, to the other side and bar retreat ; until, on finding himself sinking more and more in the morass, he loses sight of the mountain, forgets the object of aspiration, can think of only his extrication by any means however bloody ; and is in this scarce more immoral than the drowning man who grasps his neighbour. Such appears to be the character of the ambition of Macbeth, and which the poet so finely shades off by the negation of not being " without it." In fact ambition, in the usual sense, with the unscrupu- lousness it requires, with " the illness should attend it," takes its import from the other races. In the Italic race of family, the form is the greed of power ; in the Teutonic personality, it is the greed of property : both the races pursue these objects with utter recklessness of the means • not, however, as more immoral than the Celts, but as more unreasoning ; because the means are absorbed, respectively, into the motives and the end. The Celts, who seize all three together, through the nexus of the means, present alone the counterbalancing and self-contentions of Macbeth. Their point of view being social, not merely national nor merely personal, their proper species of ambition is best distinguished by the name of 166 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. glory. The lawful use of this propension pervades the language of Macbeth. And for even the abuse, he has been furnished an apology by Shakespeare himself, in another of Ms pieces, where he puts, as if with systematic reference to race, the following sentiment on the lips of a French princess : " Glory grows guilty of detested crimes." 1 It is the case, career, and character of Macbeth in a line. Thus, most the scruples which lie alleges to himself against the murder, in Act i. s. 9, are of this glory-loving, social bearing. And the conclusion which is provoked in the ensuing scene, by Lady Macbeth's questions, proclaims a spirit that only lives, and that luxuriates in popularity : Much. — We will proceed no further in this business. He hath honoured me of late ; and I have bought Golden opinions of all sorts of people, Which should be zoom now in their neioest gloss, Not cast aside so soon. But the most frequent and expressive form in which the sentiment reveals itself, is the recurrence of the term honour, as in the very passage cited. He scarce seems conscious of other boons, and never once refers to interest. Thus, when he offers to tempt Banquo, he only says : " It shall make honour for you." Nay, to the Doctor of his Lady, he would promise, even figuratively, for her cure, not a pile of gold, but to " a2?plaud him to the echo." In the list of the enjoy- ments which he would covet for even old age, namely, honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, he thus assigns it the place of honour, the others also being strictly social. 1 Love's Labour Lost. MACBETH. 1G7 And what his meaning was is illustrated by the sequel of the passage, in the dread substitute of : Curses not loud but deep, niouth-honour, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dai - e not. Thus what he valued is not, like the vulgar ambition of brute domination, the mouth-honour of mere station ; the sort of greatness which he sought was the heart-honour of popularity. To the last, when he is vanquished by Macduff, or rather by fate, he will not yield, To kiss the ground, before young Malcolm's feet, And to be baited by the rabble's curse. So strictly does the poet maintain again, as usual, the " ruling passion strong hi death "—a rabble's curse being an hyperbole of insignificance in social censure, and by conse- quence, in one who shrinks from it, of social sensibility. It must be needless to point out this final test of socia- bility and its consequence of honour as marking equally the Celtic race, and quite contrasting it with the race of persona- lity and self-interest. The sociability is familiar in what the English stigmatise as the '• clannishness " of the Irish and the Scotch ; in their clustering when possible, at home or elsewhere, in towns or hamlets, not dispersing through the forests individually like the Teutons ; in their uniformity of religion, which proves a sentiment of collectivity, a sensi- bility to public censure, this being also the spring of honour. What, accordingly, is the point of honour with the Irish and Scotch as nations 1 Not to give up the " old religion," or the " Covenant," which mark them nationally. "With the French, whose nationality remains political and proud, and 168 NEW EXEGESIS OP SHAKESPEAEE. whose symbolical attachment to theology is therefore less, the sole effective moral sanction among the people is honour. The man who knew the nation best, when he would insti- tute a new order, to consolidate his throne; did not fail to dedicate it to this sentiment. In other races the order courted is the legion of wealth or rank. 6. The general result of this fourfold exposition and application is, that purposely or otherwise the portrait of Mac- beth is but the idealization, as alleged, of the Celtic race. It would be easy and instructive to accumulate the confirmation by juxtaposition of the frivolities and even crudities of the critics. But it would look too much like triumphing, and be beneath the purpose. It would, moreover, be unfair to pursue men into the details, who started from the ground described by Stevens, as follows : " A picture of conscience encroaching upon fortitude, of magnanimity once animated by virtue and afterwards extinguished by guilt, was what Shakespeare meant to display in the character and conduct of Macbeth." This sole idea of " conscience encroaching upon fortitude" — no doubt suggested by the notion that Hamlet's adage was universal, although imputing a rehash of the same character to Shakespeare — would of itself suffice to utterly pervert the whole conception. It was not conscience, to which there is no more allusion than to telegraphy ; the intimidator here was its formal contrary, calculation. No more was the " magnanimity extinguished by guilt" or otherwise ; for it persisted, as has been seen, to the last moment the same as ever. Nor was this state that of being " animated once by virtue" in the usual sense, of a religious or moral motive, 169 wherein the writer must have meant it ; for else to describe magnanimity as animated by virtue, would be like specifying a cloud or billow as saturated by water. Eut thus it is that even men of serious ability must talk and even write, in the absence of settled views. Here, however, the condition has proved favourable to the results. The sole escape from the "first concoction" was the inconsequence of the critics, indulged more fully from a low opinion of the coherence of their author. A few examples of the latter point may direct notice to the refinements of both the portrait of Macbeth and the genius of Shakespeare. Macbeth concludes the enumeration already cited of the motives which dissuaded from the murder of Duncan, with these hues : I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only A vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself, And falls on th' other side. Act i. sc. 9. The word side in the last line is objected to by some, on the ground of being tautologous with "sides" in the second; and they would read " upon the other," though what the other is, they scarce determine. " Macbeth," says Stevens to this effect, " is meant for the rider, his intent for his horse, and his ambition for his spur ; but unluckily as the words are arranged, the spur is said to overleap itself. Such hazar- dous things are long-drawn metaphors in the hands of careless writers" It might be added that the hazard pro- ceeds perhaps as often from short-drawn minds in the com- mentators ; and the critic would, in this case, be a pertinent example. Shakespeare commits no such nonsense, in meta- 170 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. phor or otherwise, as make a spur to over or to under leap itself. He, on the contrary, says expressly that Macbeth has no spur at all ; and that he has, instead, a vaulting ambi- tion, an ambition that would reach the end without passing through the means ; for it is for the means that he wants the spur. Thus the ambition is Macbeth himself ; the means or horse is Duncan's murder, which is also the subject of his " intent." So when he comes to make the leap, and has no spur to force his steed, he vaults, himself, with his eager haste and sudden halt, out of the saddle, and falls, like riders at any fox hunt, " on th' other side" — not of the horse, but hedge. Thus the metaphor and meaning are at all events clear and regular, requiring but a slight amendment of the punctuation, as follows : Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps, itself ; that is, lecvps over or across, itself, while the steed remains behind. This is Shakespeare's usual meaning in the com- pounds with over. In the same play, he has " overcome us like a summer cloud," i. e. come over or across us. In " Love's Labour Lost," there is, " over-glance the superscript " — glance over or through it : the phrase, it is true, is given here to Holof ernes. But the form is quite common, as in the " Merchant of Venice," the " lofty argosies" are said to " over- peer the petty traffickers." In fine, Macbeth had said himself, when Duncan named Malcolm to the princedom of Cumber- land, as heir-apparent to the throne : That is a step on which I must fall down, Or else o'erleap, for in my way it lies. This indeed affords a precise comment on the passage. The 171 difference merely is between falling " doicn" and " on the other side" : the former, because the object to be leapt is an obstruc- tion, incidental to the means and aloof from the end; the other, because the object is the means itself, on the farther side of which lies immediately the end — into which it is the foible of Macbeth's ambition, as was above illustrated, to launch the imagination. The image and expression were not sufficiently clear, of course, for men to whom the object to be imaged was un- known. But in reality the great poet has never been, in both the qualities, at once more picturesquely and profoundly strict to nature. The mere epithet of '' vaulting" presents a resume in picture of the traits above explained of the ambition of the Celtic race. Nay, its whole social destiny of organization is a vault, an arch whose part is to combine the two abutments of the extreme races. Hence, indeed, the explanation of a singular phenomenon pervading the political history of the Celts, — their inaptitude for working in either of the •physical bases. Not in man, Uke the Eomano-Italian race of domination ; for with all their brilliant bravery and their extensive conquests, they hold to-day about the same cir- cumscription in Europe that they occupied two thousand years since. Not in nature, or territory, like the race of exploitation; for though they have had colonies, they were as transient as their conquests. It is that both the conquests and colonizations of this race were to be made in the abstract realms of reason, science, civilization. This part could have come into play, but in proportion as the two lower races had successively developed the two orders of materials. The Celts, in the meantime, must have been trampled down by 172 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. both, while humanizing the first and civilizing the other ; l and must have their aspirations, their qualities, their very genius appear what they were painted, accordingly, by one who shared them, in the sadly sublime portrait of the Knight of La Mancha. Thus has Shakespeare, with a penetration which is still more divine, because the atmosphere around him was less inspiring than with Cervantes, hit off in the word "vaulting," the ambition of this race. An ambition not of appetite or passion, but of intellect, and consequently manifested less in action than imagination ; too com- plexionally elevated in the choice of the end ; too logically circumspective in the sufficiency of the means ; an ambition without the illness that should attend it to gain the object, and so essaying to vault the " illness," and therefore falling, that is failing. The same critic, and, it seems, all others, interpret Shakespeare no less uncouthly in another of those exquisite refinements of characterization. When the reluctance of Macbeth is overwhelmed by the wife, and he surrenders, but with the lingering suggestion : " If we should fail, " he is conceived to be proceeding to state the consequences of the failure, and to suffer interruption from the " We fail !" of the lady : and this rejoinder is moreover conjectured by the same Stevens to have been prompted by the vulgarism — " If we fail, we fail" ! So the lady, at the height of her demoniac sublimity, would be sufficiently unpreoccupied to have such 1 " I am weary,'' exclaims an honest German, Leschtlan," of hearing the Eomans cited when our civilization is mentioned, while nothing is said of our obligation to the Celts. It was not the Latins, it was the Gauls who were our first instructors." 173 nonsense in her mind, and what were more, would he dis- posed to relax wantonly the pitch of tension to which her eloquence had just heen " screwing up " the feeble purpose of the husband, by introducing a triviality which broke the sternness of her bearing, and even conceded the possibility of the objections she was combatting ! What a notion this betrays both of the characters and situation — characters incomprehensible, it is true, to the English mind. But it also shows the impression which those critics had of Shakespeare, as one who jumbles by haphazard the ridiculous with the sublime, and is more studious of saws or quibbles than of system in even character. It must be needless to remark that Macbeth' s phrase is no less travestied, in being supposed the flat commencement of a needless exposition : for the con- sequences of the failure were too obvious and too awful to be declared, or at least detailed, beyond the emphatic sugges- tion. Accordingly the punctuation should here again be amended. The dash that, in the best editions, is appended to Macbeth' s words (" If we should fail — "), to denote the pretended interruption, should be suppressed, and on the other hand, transferred to the answer of the lady, where in reality there is a break between her passion and her explanation : — Macb. — If we 6hould fail ? Lady— We fail !— But screw, etc. It is much the quos ego — Sed prcestat of Virgil's Neptune. With this plain reading, the two characters, the most pro- found perhaps in Shakespeare — the reasoning caution of the Celt, the furious rashness of the sex, which, although Celtic in this instance, must modify the law of race, because per- 174 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. vading all the races, and, indeed, the organic universe — the two characters are found daguerreotyped respectively in these few words, with the most admirahle truth to nature and to their dramatic correlation. It is, in fact, in such refinements that Shakespeare's genius is most distinguished, and the critics no less guilty of omission than commission. When Lady Macbeth hears the alarm of the king's murder, and exclaims : " What, in our house " ? the subtle Warburton thinks it " fine." His reason is, that this circumstance must have been uppermost in her mind, and that she thus betrays the slightness of her concern ; whereas, he proceeds, Macbeth's answer is sincere and repentant. Both the branches of the opinion are erroneous to contrariety. The poet's object could not have been to "betray" to the spectators what they must know of course, that the lady's grief was insincere ; for were it otherwise, the character was broken and the action ended. What the poet had to show, and what alone could be dramatic, was human nature working still beneath the mask of affectation. The allusion to the house, then, so far from meaning unconcern, was designed as an involuntary revelation of the speaker's consciousness : it was not that it prepossessed her, but that she felt that it compromised her. So, on the other hand, with Macbeth, who represents the like duplicity of an ostensible insincerity and an implicit compromission. To the metaphor of Macduff's horror about the " life of the building," Macbeth answers, and before hearing in plainer terms who is murdered : " What is it you say, the life " ? — an expression that, on his part, also, betrays a consciousness of the deed, and an engross- ment by the circumstance of " life " or its privation which MACBETn. 175 distracts him from the main object, the person of the victim. It is true that the allusion of the previous speaker to " life" alone may be imagined to have prompted the particular in this instance. But the ellipsis -was of course an arrangement of the poet. And what evinces that his meaning must have been as now corrected, is the enquiry of the honest Lennox, which follows instantly : " Mean you his Majesty" ? Here is the poet's comment to the audience upon Macbeth's blunder. And what confirms this, in turn, is that just the like cut succeeds the lady's " What, in our house " ? in Banquo's answer : " Too cruel, anywhere" And yet these signals have been wholly overlooked by the critics, although, moreover, the trait was broadly maximised for them in Hamlet : So full of artless (awkward) jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. 1 Dr. Johnson, the most sensible of them, if not the sharpest, and whose errors there already was occasion to remark upon, makes an omission which exemplifies the loose- ness of all these annotators. After lauding with such emphasis the answer of Macbeth : " I dare do all that may become a man," he takes no notice of the rejoinder of Lady Macbeth, though still superior in the merit proper to the character and purpose : What beast was 't, then, That made you break this enterprize to me ? Besides the logical and the satirical acuteness of this retort — 1 Qunctilian speaks of a famous Roman lawsuit, which was ruined by the answer of a witness to the question : " Where is your father? — Wherever he be, he is alive. — Ubicunque est, vivit." But he was found dead in a well. 176 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. conveyed so pointedly in the alternative antithesis of " beast " to " man " — there is a philosophic keenness of the highest- order hi its rebuke. It strikes at one of the most funda- mental weaknesses of Celtic nature — the yearning to blab and castle-build its enterprizes in advance ; by way, no doubt, of intellectual compensation for the lack of action, and also the necessity of social communication. But the good Doctor never dreamt of such a nature in Macbeth. Indeed, he tells us in express terms, and with the usual tone of emphasis, that this play " has no nice discriminations of character." The Doctor meant by character the English or Teutonic. This, however, has been improved upon by certain living critics, in relation to the passage in question. The reader must be aware that the world of " Shakespearean literature" has recently been thrown into commotion, and also commerce, by a discovery of the usual description, an " old edition." This famous " folio," besides age, had some marginal notes, and in a hand-writing mysteriously suspected to be Shake- speare's : hence a multitude of controversies, articles, even editions. From the collection of the notes, as issued apart from his edition of the poet by the immortalized discoverer, it seems the gravest has chanced to turn on the passage last examined. The amendment consists in reading boast for " beast," and thereupon the editor expatiates as follows : " It cannot be denied by the most scrupulous stickler for the purity of the text, etc., that this mere substitution of o for e as it were magically conjures into palpable existence the long- buried meaning of the poet." And again: "It is quite certain that people have been in the habit of reading Macbeth for the last two hundred years, some of them for the express 177 purpose of detecting blunders in the text, and yet, as far as can be ascertained, have never once hit upon this improve- ment, so trifling as regards typography, but so valuable as regards' the meaning of Shakespeare." There is a sample at once of the discovery and of the letter-press criticism generally upon Shakespeare, some allu- sions to which have been inevitable in these pages. The writer, in his exultation, thinks of nothing beyond the word. He does not seem to have expected any consequences of the change upon the argument, the antithesis, the environs in general. The word is considered, like a free-born English- man, as standing on its own bottom, independent of all around it. It was not seen that, even so, a point is turned to a platitude. A miracle is wrought by the change of a letter, and the writer is attending to orthography, not dialectic. Yet he feels himself entitled to sneer at the narrowness of " the sticklers for the purity of the text, etc." Where such a critic may set up for a latitudinarian, it is easy to judge of the rest. 1 The only feint which he thinks it requisite to make to support the change is a sophism 1 This minuteness and materialism is, however, the real root of the " solid and business" character and capacity of the English. It is the practice of their national adage, " to take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves." Let Horace and the Celts have the comfort of proclaiming, that all the parts are not equal to the whole. The Teutons are persuaded that in the former they have the substance, and leave the sticklers for method to subsist on their alleged overplus. Horace's dictum runs as follows : — JEmilium circa ludum faber unus et ungues Exprimet, et molles imitabitur sere capillos, Infelix operis summa, quia ponere totum Nesciet. 178 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. familiar as the argument ad vericundiam. Shakespeare would .not write, he says, the "vulgar" word least, or at least would not assign it to a woman of quality. Thus the writer's principle of individualism is kept to in his notion of style as of argument. "Words, he evidently thinks, are vulgar or otherwise barely in themselves, not according to the use made of them. He might, however, have observed an example at hand (as the reader of the preceding extract may have noted) of terms of a classically high respectability degraded into vulgarity by emphatic inanity. But, not to speak of principles of either taste or logic, the meetest refutation will be a plain and plump precedent. Shakespeare does then elsewhere put the alleged vulgarism in the mouth of a lady of equal rank, unmarried too, and in the soft-tem- pered moments of dalliance — not a matron and a murderess, like Lady Macbeth ; and make her use it, moreover, not like the latter, by way of argument, but in the direct form of insulting imputation. In the Merchant of Venice, the princess Portia, sketching the various nations in the persons of her suitors, is made to characterize a member of the list (by the way, too, a kinsman of the critic, the " Prince of Saxony,") as " being, when he is best, httle better than a least." To conclude with an example of another of these finer features which has entirely escaped the critics in the genius they so bepraise — though on what ground they can bepraise they leave their readers at a loss to see, and must have been themselves, if challenged, found ill able to say, in terms. And again : cum nee pes nee caput uni Reddatur formse. MACBETH. 179 When the Lady breaks in on the soliloquy of Macbeth, while their royal guest is supping in the hall of the castle ; the following curious colloquy takes place between them : Lady. — TWiy have you left the -chamber? JJacb. — Hath he asJced for me ? Lady. — Know you not he has ? What is first to be remarked is, that the replies are not answers to the point of the interrogatories, indicated in italics. Then, moreover, that they are offered in the form of questions, and look to answers entirely different, and in the last case quite absurd ; for the knowledge which the Lady asks about, or rather affirms, she knows impossible, or would have known, if her excitement allowed the least reflection, and did not pass upon her her own consciousness of the fact for uni- versal. And yet with all these cross discordances they under- stood each other, and even the spectator or reader is made to feel they should, with ease. The situation is so strained, its electricity so tense, that their intelligences seem communing, not by the words, but a sort of contact. The effect is, however, quite explicable. To distinguish the subject meant among the multitude of others that may be co-present to the mind of either party, is the principal occasion for length or logic in all colloquy. If but an object or a passion were on both sides so absorbing as to exclude the supposition of attention to any other, the communion might proceed by a sort of short-hand speech or cypher. The conscious unity of the theme supplies at once a string and clew to give connection or explanation to the interlocu- tory incoherences. Thus the nonsense of two lovers is full of meaning to themselves ; and to pass to an illustration 180 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. which will be taken for the extreme opposite, thus it also is, that the symbolic language of mathematics is enabled, through the singleness of the subject considered, to dispense with that mass of verbiage which makes the daubing of common style. And so, to give the highest conception of an intensity of preoccupation, in which all else has been spon- taneously suppressed by a conjoint feeling, the liveliest method is to paint the parties as holding converse with each other by curt enquiries, which, while they answer, look away from, one other. This moreover has the effect, in the present situation, of exhibiting that mutual shyness of a complicit and excited guiltiness which might be termed the quintessence, the aroma of its expression. It distills the physiognomy of crime from its brutality. Besides, how exquisitely are the characters maintained at this refined pitch — the evasory irresolution of Macbeth in quest of pretexts ; the pursuing instigation of the wife reproving cautiously, for fear of furnishing, by provocation, such a pretext for full revolt. But above all, the power of Shakespeare and his province, as now defined, are to be noted in this scene, in that mental ventriloquism by which not only the same personage holds distinct converse with his own thoughts, but distinct persons address each other through the thoughts, more than the words. To these few samples of the omissions and commissions of native critics, it is but fair to add, that foreigners have not done greatly better. M. Guizot, who may pass for a critic among statesmen as he passes for a statesman in the order of professors, has the following curious estimate of the character now analysed : " un caractere d' irreflexion et de 181 mobilite qui appartient a une civilization presque sauvage ; ses passions sont imjperieuses, mais aucune serie de raisson- ncments et de projots ne les determine et ne le gouverne. It must Le now needless to say, that these assertions present, at every point, the precise opposite of Macbeth' s qualities. Is it then that the writer never read the piece with care, or that he was unable to comprehend it 1 It may be partly the latter, for a reason to be noted, notwithstanding his being a translator of Shakespeare. But the principal cause was partly passion and partly policy. The work in question was published in 1852 ; that is, soon after M. Guizot had himself and his royal master expelled from the ministry and throne of France, through a dogged imposition of his doctrinized Anglicanism, with its confusion, corruption, and commercialism, on a Celtic nation. Of course this nation had in conse- quence the precise vices stated, and it would be safe to say so through the medium of the Scotch Celts : it was a prelude to the tactic by which the same hand employed the Crom- wells as a stalking-horse against the French Emperor. Not merely safe, but also politic, the English being well known to like a man the better, the worse he likes that race But there were then some hopes of reinstalling the entente cordiale. The ex-minister set to making what the Americans call " political capital." The way to do this with the English is believed, on the Continent, to be by rapturous admiration of either the Anglo-Saxon race, the genius of Shakespeare, or the blessings of the Bible. Thus Kossuth, when he came to enlist England against Austria, had just learned the English language in the odd horn-book of Shakespeare. M. Guizot was already president of a Bible society in Paris. He there- 182 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. fore took up the alternative of "Shakespeare et son Temps." The only literary glory of the unfortunate Welsh and Irish, the Bards, he transfers wholesale to the credit of the English. Instead of labouring, as history assures us for centuries, to ex- terminate them as an obstacle to quiet domination, the English were their patrons and propagators, as producers. Hence the nation had been the most poetical in Europe. Hence in turn it produced Shakespeare, the greatest poet, etc. Such is the project which, together with his rancour towards the French or Celtic character, produced his travesty of Macbeth. The animus, in fact, is .no less plain than the misjudg- ment. It is not the " civilization " alone that is sauvage — (by the way, this " savage " species of " civilization " would seem to have escaped the professor in his history) ; all things in the play of Macbeth are savage. The style itself is but " une energie sauvage". Nay, the reasoning or dialectic, which he cannot dissemble, he vilifies by the name of recherche, and this he also tells us is a property of savages. Take his own words : " Ceque nous connaissons des discours ales sauvages contient beaucoup d'idees recherchees," etc. Thus M. Guizot as critic comprehends the Celts 'of Shake- speare as sagaciously as the politician comprehended the Celts of Erance. But while Macbeth and his countrymen are made decided savages, what does the writer think of the contemporary Hamlet 1 " Hamlet," says M. Guizot, "est beau, populaire, genereux, affectueux, tenure meme !" ISTow, this suggests the species of apology alluded to. For not the pettiest fueilletonist of the Paris press would have hazarded his reputation on the crudities just cited, unless he really was deluded to some extent as to their srrossness. It is but 183 fair to himself, then, to observe, that M. Guizot is far more a Teuton than he is a Frenchman. His sympathies, his studies, and doubtless his blood, are all, like his politics and religion, of Hamlet's race. He has always had an Englishman's contempt for the French, and they in turn have detested in him what they call his morgue — a quite peculiarly Go tine quality dressed in French formalism. It is quite probable, therefore, that this sympathy and antipathy co-operated with the passion and the purpose exposed, to mislead a man so able into notions so preposterous. How different is the estimate of Schlegel, though a Teuton, who says of this play, with a noble enthusiasm, that " since the Eumenides of Eschylus nothing so grand and terrible has ever been written." It was a question left impending at the close of the previous chapter, whether Shakespeare must not owe the extraordinary penetration, shewn in the part and play of Hamlet, to a sympathy of race ; and the decision Avas referred to the experimental result of the analysis of Macbeth, a case excluding the supposed cause. But the effect, it is seen, the excellence continues here the same, and so would equally claim the poet as appertaining to the Celtic family. Indeed, the character and conduct of Macbeth, as now expounded, appear the more profound or the more finished of the two portraitures. The composition also takes the cast of the Celtic mind. Both the unities of place and time are far less outraged than is common. The former is but once so, in passing to the court of England. The time is not determined, but, as is well remarked by Schlegel, " that time appears the shortest to the imagination which is the most crowded with events ;" and this able critic also observes the striking con- 184 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. trast between the Celtic rapidity of the action in Macbeth, and its unwieldy and straggling tedionsness in Hamlet. The pieces are to each other as the French and German empires, or even as the Scotch and the English jurisprudence. The personages also are fewer in Macbeth than in any other of the first-class plays ; a fact implying a corresponding composition in the action. The piece itself is a good deal shorter, the economy is more compact, the distribution of the scenes is more sequential and suggestive, the metaphors are less extravagant, the common-places less intrusive, the style more powerful, pithy, pure, than Shakespeare ever reached elsewhere. He seems concentrated, composed, condensed for this supreme effort of his genius. But all this, though it may neutralize the inference as to Hamlet, is on the other hand as inconclusive of the Celtic claim to Shakespeare. It is in fact a simple consequence of the department assigned the dramatist. The great innovator could not edify beyond the groundfloor of character, and so his modicum of action is still but character drawn out. But when the character to be depicted was ratiocinative, syste- matic, how could the conduct and the composition be dis- orderly, without absurdity ? And on the other hand, in a character of which the essence was incoherence, as the motives were radiations from the centre of personality, to give the piece constructive qualities, would be preposterous to art and truth. It is the subjects, then, and not his sym- pathies, that guided Shakespeare's genius. At least, it will be well, before finally concluding, to wait the test of the avowedly heterogeneous race of Shylock — after fortifying the foregoing results by the secondary characters. SHAKESPEARE'S USE OF THE SUPERNATURAL CHAPTEE IV. SECONDARY CHARACTERS. PRINCIPALLY OF THE PIECES 0FJ3AMLET AND MACBETH. 1. To keep some order among a crowd, the chief subordinates of both those plays will be considered, first, in reference to the race, like the principals ; and then in contrast with each other, in proportion to their saliency. It would be useless and pedantic to push this summary discrimination into a formal application of all and each of the testing attributes. The type in secondary personages fades forthwith into the mass, presenting little of the race, nay, individual, beyond the name. The course will be, then, to note the sparks, but the more probative for this declension, here and there as stricken out by mere attrition with the leading characters, and let them run illumination along the frame- work in the previous articles. The place of precedence belongs by rank as well as courtesy to the women. Ophelia, and even the Queen, are main agents in the piece of Hamlet, and the dread Lady Macbeth is scarcely second to the Thane himself. "With regard to the Gothic ladies, the common trait that first arrests is a neutrality of intellectual and moral character I 2 186 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. not far from weakness. The Queen, though cause of the whole action, is but a passive and unconscious instrument. She falls from duty to the husband not alone in his life time, but also in re-marrying with indecent and imprudent promp- titude. Though fond of Hamlet, she seems to lend the same negative complicity to the proceedings of the seducer against the son as against the husband. She, on the other hand, is overwhelmed, by the foul tirade of Hamlet, into weeping and wailing and wringing of hands. Yet she utters not a word in reprobation of the revealed fratricide, but after sides with him in both his projects for the murder of Hamlet also. In short, she nowhere has a substantive opinion of her own. And so adroitly has this pale part been carried out by the great artist, that the critics appear puzzled whether to acquit or not, of all beyond her first transgression, the conjugal infidelity. The master-hand is still more striking in the manner of her death. It is, conformably, as exquisitely negative as possible — that is, by poison, from her own hand, in a VINOUS BEVERIDGE, and THEOUGH MISTAKE. In Ophelia, the trait is perhaps positively feeble. But, being here manifested through the laudable or natural affec- tions of filial piety and of love, it takes the guise of amiability; and the illusion is farther heightened, even hallowed, at least haloed, by her unmerited calamity, the most affecting of human maladies. Was not the malady, too, like Hamlet's, a mere feature of the character, repeated in the other sex, and thus allowable in the same piece ? It-would be graceless as an entomologist to enter deep into analysis of this innocuous and evanescent butterfly of the sex. Besides, her charms are themselves witnesses, it is perceived, to the SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 187 debility. In conduct, too, she listens readily to the profes- sions of a boyish prince, although this weakness is no doubt a thing of race less than of sex. She, on the other hand, obeys as inertly the inhibitions of the father. And the dramatist, with profound art, has stamped her malady and end with the same signature of nullity, or at least negation, that marked the Queen. For whether it was grief for the death of her father, or despair at the supposed madness or departure of her lover, or the concussion of the two passions on finding Hamlet to be the murderer, that should be taken to have shattered the fragile intellect of Ophelia, is left by Shakespeare in that vague indefiniteness so distinctive of feeble character. And the occasion of her death is still more negative than the Queen's. K"ow, it may seem that the existence of deficient per- sonality, which is thus candidly avowed in both the females in the piece, must be in downright contradiction with the race of personality. How should the women be so passive, so obsequious, so self-denying, where the men are so self- willed, so coldly obdurate and selfish 1 The fact, however, is in profound harmony with reason, nature, and history. Without this deference, society would be impossible in such a race. It is the female pliability or nullity that permits union with the intense and the eccentric individuality of the males. These — as, indeed, in all races — can bear in women but their own contraries, and long habit combines with nature to mould the weaker on the stronger counterpart. Bat the females must reflect the counter- sinking with the relief ; must give the impress of the characters possessed by the males, but not of those they lack. Thus, they must not 188 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. be opinionative, this "being prominent in the men. But, on the other hand, if wit and reasoning he deficient in the latter, it does not follow that the women shall possess them, hut the reverse ; for it is evident that they would he obnoxious or unprized, and could, beside, not be developed above the gentilitial measure. Moreover, from the limits of this mea- sure as delineated, the collision of the sexes and its conse- quence of correlation must be most marked in the inferior and physical features of humanity. Thus the affection of the female, instead of being displayed by manners, must take the coarseness of caressing, to be made sensible to men of muscle. It must, in short, approach the animal, the physical expres- sion. And perhaps even the muscularity must have its contrast in the female, in a flaccidity of tissue and a fragility of constitution. " Nervous" women were even revered among the Germans as prophetesses. These curious exigencies of the conjugal relation are proved by history. The female moiety in this race appear distinguished among nations by the pack-horse sort of drudgery which they submit to, from the days of Tacitus. The German woman of the people is now, as then, a beast of burthen. And if her Anglo-Saxon sister — alleviated of the burthen by the march of model-farming, manufacture, and machinery — be inspirited more frequently to kick against the pricks, there are some scenes in our police courts still less creditable than the German, which exemplify the principle by their quite national peculiarity. The Teuton women are as remarkable for their affection as their submissiveness, if one could take them by the muscular demonstrations to that effect. They hardly ever, in the German section, go in public with SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 189 the males, without being locked with them by hand or arm, when not even by the waist or neck : that, is to say, till after marriage, when the wife follows, like the dog. The caresses cool in England to showers of ceremonial kisses, and the appellative of "dear," which is the common name for husband. The female prudery, and the male marriage-law, in its obstruction to divorce (which has, however, at last been breached 1 ), are obvious tributes to the same exigence. Even 1 The English, especially of the ruling classes, are often criticised for a dogged tenacity of their usages and institutions in even oddities or contradictions. The censure is not always intelligent or just. The resistance is unreasoned, but it is not therefore groundless. The preju- dices that inspire it are a vital part of the national character, and by the natural consensus set as sentinels upon its weaknesses. The long oppo- sition to a law of divorce attests this principle. No doubt the English law-maters were self-contradictory. They made the marriage union, like all other social ties with them, a matter of mere personal and utilitarian compact ; and yet for many generations they refused its simplest conse- quences, of allowing the parties to dissolve it, however noxious. But their instinct here, as usual, served them better than their reason, as is verified already by the results of experience. For now about a year that the law of divorce is working, the number of applications in London approach 300 ; and the dates present a ratio continually augmenting. This eruption might indeed have been easily predicted by any one who fully understood the race and nation. It was a consequence of the com- plexion which had been the real cause of the community of women among the warrior Spartans. There is no danger of such extremity in any modern community ; but the sooner the tendency is here arrested the better. The policy of this appears already to be felt ; the remedy, too, begins to be applied. But this remedy is as viciously in character as the disease. More than half the applications are accumulated in arrear, and the purpose no doubt is to make the court a new chancery. Thus the juridical administration will be turned, more Anglico, into an engine for defeating the enactments of the Legislature. " Liberty " by statute ; oppression by administration. 190 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. the physical conformity of lankness is observable in both the temperament of the women and the taste of the men. The English lady must be delicate much less in mind, perhaps, than body, (if it is not that the one thing is taken for the other) ; and the glaring fairness, so much admired, betrays aversion to robust health. Thus Ophelia would be the Teutonic ideal of a lover. And thus Othello, in example of the same muscular and soldier character, is matched with the analogous disposition in Desdemona. So praeter-humanly has the instinct of the poet adhered to nature, amid the tissue of opinions and even appearances against him ! Mythology itself, in fine, contributes its profound testimony to the prin- ciple of the neutrality of women in a race of muscle. The most characterless, mindless, and unresisting of the goddesses was yoked with the most muscular and the most military of the gods. Venus was the wife of Vulcan, and the mistress of Mars — these prime divinities, the Thor and Odin, of the Teutonic race. It is perceived, then, why neither Ophelia nor the Queen display an intellect or an ambition above the province of loving housewives, The rank of Hamlet never enters into the passion of the one ; the other never takes a part in the public business of the husband, even though she be the channel through which he reached the throne. The gentihtial test of Conscience is scarce precluded by this domesticity, although it could not well be active, being an element of opposition. Accordingly, it is not mentioned, not only in Ophelia, in whom her youth and innocence might seem to leave it dormant ; the Queen also, with her adulterous and murderous complicity, does not once utter the name of conscience, even SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 191 though pointing in this direction ; as, where she speaks of Hamlet's outrage as " putting daggers in her ears" and when they also are said to " turn her eyes into her very soul," where she beholds such " black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct." This absence is a consequence of the great law above unfolded, that women can, in warrior races, have no volition of their own. It is the reason why the warrior Arabs imagined woman without a soid. For the soul of the Turk is the conscience of the Teuton. 1 The Manners of both females are no less consonant with the principle. It is the natural and the extenuating explana- tion of the conduct which is reproached, in such coarse terms, by the spleen of Hamlet, to his mother : Why she would hang on him (the first husband). As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on. Even the delicate Ophelia receives more passively her lover's grossnesses than was excusable by deference to either rank or seeming madness. She coniplinients the most outrageous of them by the name of wit or keenness. She accords him prompt permission to lay his head upon her lap, no doubt esteeming it fully proper, since ske refuses his whole person : and it is said to have been actually the mode of courtship of high-life Eng- land. The poet thus designed his women to reflect the manners of the men It must no doubt be in this notion of their moral 1 "It is remarkable," says an enthusiastic eulogist of this race, " that in the religion of Odin, as in that of Mahomet, women appear to have had no part in the future life.'' (Laing, Transl. of the Heimskringla, Dis- sertation.) Even the goddesses themselves were employed but as bar- maids, to keep the flagons of the topers in perpetual plenitude. 192 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. absorption, and also of the benumbing influence of custom, that he is led to stain the lips of this pure and amiable being with the foul snatches of bawdy ballads which she utters in her derangement ; for they, of course, must be supposed to have been learned in her days of sanity. It may be fancied, however, that, neglecting this discrepancy, the poet intended the obscenity of thought or language as a sign of madness. It is the common explanation of the hindishness of Hamlet. But the sign would be preposterous, as above shown upon that personage. | 2. If the reader will now turn from this Gothic type of woman to the stern, pure, ambitious, and cruel Lady Macbeth, he will find cause to admire anew the strange pro- fundity of Shakespeare in assorting the female contrast of the races with the males. Macbeth would never, with a Teuton wife, have breasted enterprises good or evil. She would have lounged by his side " at home," and listened to his endless projects, and seen nothing but amusement in his dreams of the "Weird Sisters. On the other hand, the Celtic sarcasm and spirit of his actual partner would play in vain against a stolid, obstinate, or self-willed husband of the other race ; and the collision of her domineering instincts with his own would soon conduct her, as complainant, to Doctors' Commons or the Police Courts. Witness both the fewness and fate of English wives from France. ISTor is, accordingly, such instigator necessary here ; the race of action or muscu- larity have, in their passions and desires, the utmost impulse and even " illness that should attend" their coarse ambition. As on the other side, the ratiocinative self-complacency of the SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 193 Celt does not require a dawdling listener to foster further his inaction ; to " hang upon him" like a bridle, when what he needed was a spur. So admirably providential are the conformities of nature. But Avhat does nature say, in turn, to the alleged type of this Celtic exigence ? How do the sternness and energy (the crime, of course, being a mere incident x ) which, with ambition, frame the character of Lady Macbeth, agree with the distinc- tive features of her gentilitial sisterhood 1 The mere question or juxtaposition will shed a philosophic light upon a number of notorious, though unnoted, phenomena, in both the history and manners of the various branches of this race. To keep, however, to the most developed and the least 1 It was even still less, and all but justifiable. George Chalmers, in that noble monument of erudition which he raised to his country, " The Caledonia," remarks of this Princess, who was grand-daughter of Kenneth IV. : " She had the most afflictive injuries rankling at her heart ; a grandfather dethroned and slain ; a brother assassinated ; and her husband (the first) burnt within his castle with fifty of his friends ; herself a fugitive with Lalach her infant son. Such were the cruelties which prompted the Lady Gruoch's vengeful thoughts, and which •' filled her from the crown to the toe, topful of direst cruelty," (vol. i. p. 405). All this she had suffered from the family of Duncan. And Macbeth too had, on his part, in addition to her wrongs, to avenge upon the same family the murder of his father, and the usurpation, by Duncan, of his better title to the throne. Why did not Shakespeare admit these pleas, which would have moralized the action? Because, it may be said, he did not find them in Holinshed. But why were they excluded from the mythical accounts? Because the nature of this process is to eliminate the accidental, to sink the motives that would have actuated people of all races, and to preserve but what is special to the national type. It was this skeleton that Shakespeare's genius recognized in the tradition. K 194 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. influenced by other races, it is familiar that the French women of at least the lower classes are said to rule, not alone the household, but even the husband and his department. They are invariably, in the cities, the cashiers of the small traders, and continue the concern in the case of the husband's death. Vast factories — among the largest of the Empire, perhaps of Europe — are at this moment worked by widows, and reputed for model management. How many dozen English merchants would trust their counting-houses to their wives, between the Scylla and Charybdis of the milliners and the mistakes 1 Eemale clerks are even in Dublin far less singular than in London. This fact-established superiority, as well of energy as head, is maintained equally upon ascending to the higher classes in both the races. What has rendered for centuries the salons of Paris as famous and as formidable for their politics as for their wit ; while those of London are still more nameless for the former than even the latter 1 How come the women even of fashion to be keen and active politicians, in a nation whose men know little and care less about such matters ; 1 while, on the other hand, the ladies of the land of " self- government" scarce ever enter into statesmanship beyond the names of "Whig and Tory 1 This is surely a double contrast that should have earlier attracted notice. It is explained by the above principles, and was embodied by Shakespeare's 1 It is well known that the women of the working-class in Paris are prime agents in kindling the emeutes and revolutions. The very fishwomen (dames des Holies) are a political power. Witness the visit made them in their savoury reception-rooms by Napoleon III. on his ascending the throne, and their reception at the palace on the birth of his son. This must be assuredly a climax of confirmation. SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 195 genius in the contrast between the females of the plays of Hamlet and Macbeth. The very courtezans, who, often less for pleasure or parade than pure ambition, have sought the favour of Kings of France, have more than once evinced a statesmanship of both profundity and beneficence. In England the very Queens have displayed nothing of this kind. The few of any energy and intellect were Celtic, The wife of the Conqueror, the "good Queen Maude" of Scotland, and the heroic Margaret of Anjou, exhaust the number. Compare with the last, in point of character and conduct, the two Queens of the rival " Eoses," both contem- porary and native, and the contrast will be found no bad example of the races : it is furnished to the reader as if expressly in Eicharcl III., where the two English women only scold, to be forthwith cajoled again. Queen Elizabeth was prosperous, for she personified the nation ; but her policy was mere selfishness with its tenacity, guile, and cruelty ; it had nothing of the positive and leading character of intellect, nor was it tried by those adversities that are the tests of moral greatness ; her well-known pettyness and childish vanities were incompatible with either, although they do not tell so badly, being a trait of the race in general. It is a case of the " curling" passion from the prince to the policeman. In fine, advancing to the highest form of this female energy, the heroic, the Celtic race alone produced the patriot heroines of modern history, in Scotland, in Spain, and more especially in France. Who does not see in the social aim, the well-planned purpose, and firm nerve of Charlotte Corday, a genuine kinswoman of Lady Macbeth 1 The other day a young French girl, in a foreign and fanatic city, while 196 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. her parents are murdered and she herself wounded, instead of fainting or flying, fights and vanquishes like a dragoon. For two years back English women have been massacred all over India, and the thousand trumpets that stood ready to resound the slightest semblance of an act of heroism have been forced to remain silent. Nor is it only in modern times, but if we look to the ancient also, and mark the Britons as they flit across the vista of a generation, from the wilderness of the unknown into the void of annihilation, we seize in transit full three females whose names will live as long as history. There is first the brave, the eloquent, and graceful Queen of the Iceni. Then Cartismandua, the Queen of the Brigantes, who reigned and led her troops, though she had a husband living. Finally, Queen Marcia, celebrated for her laws — the adoption of which appears to have obtained for King Alfred the title of the Anglo-Saxon lawgiver. The very fact of those women being allowed to lead their troops, and to rule in their own right the most warlike of the British tribes, would of itself be sufficient to prove the sex superior. Another fact to the same purpose is much more noted, but as unexplained. It is that the Picts, who were a portion of the same people, ran the descent of their Kings, not in the" male, but the female line. The Irish pretend this to be the consequence of a compact by which they gave these people some princesses for their monarchs ; or, as Bede has it, wives for the whole population, the Picts having migrated from Scythia without women. But this was but the ex-post-facto explanation of a strange custom. With the ancient Cantabrians, who likewise were Celts, the daughters were preferred in the inheritance of even property. SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 197 It was really against the ambition of the Celtic women that the Teutonic Franks established the " Salic law." There was no need of it at home, where the women were Teutonic. Such were, then, the Celtic females from the present to the earliest times — back to Boadicea, nay, to Penthesilea ; for the Amazons (fact or fable) belonged to the same race. 1 ' See, in Justin, Trogus Pompeius, who was himself a Celt. It is curious that the name of this amazonian queen is radically Celtic, both in form and significance. The Pen means, in the dialects of Wales and Brittany, the head, and metaphorically in titular names a chieftain or sovereign; as in the families Penhoen, Pewthievre, and in jPendragon. The foundation of the ludicrous tales about the Amazons was probably the deference accorded them by their husbands, at a time and in a region where the rest of the sex were slaves. In fact these husbands got the nickname of ywaiKOKparov/xevai ; that is, woman or wife-ruled, as was noted of the present French. In the east as in the west the ability of the Celtic women is remarked by ancient writers, from Polybius to Plutarch. The former records the instance of a Gallo-Grcecian matron, which will combine another illustration in a future note. In speaking of the equally heroic Eponina, Dr. Smith, in his Dictionary of Ancient Geography — in which the Gauls are treated with a creditable candour — observes, that " she was one of the illustrious women of Gaul ; for, adds he, it is one of the characteristics of the nation to produce women above the common stamp.'' The question whether the Cimbri were Celtic or Teutonic might be aided by the circumstance recorded of their women, that they rushed into the battle, and with their naked arms tried to tear aside the shields that covered the Komans, in order to give play to the claymores of their husbands. Another ancient example of a warrior Queen, no less famous than Penthesilea, was much more clearly Celtic. It is Camilla, the illustrious Queen of the Volscians, who aided Turnus in the real or fabled contest with the Trojans, and whose exploits form the burthen of Book XL of .art of logic, definition, which he applies, for example, to insanity, as already cited : Mad call I it, for to define true madness, What is 't hut to be nothing else but mad ? The logic is further combined with his philosophy, in the vaunt that he can find, with the clue of the circumstances, truth, though it were hidden Avithin the centre. The name of Conscience would be out of place, even out 208 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. of face, in a politician. Besides, a courtier should be too pliant, like the Teuton women, to set up any. However, Polonius shews Indirectly a force of conscience, that impels him into candour, against the rudiments of his trade. "When Ophelia, to test the madness of Hamlet, is placed to meet him, and the father gives her a prayer-hook to have the air of being piously occupied, he forthwith feels a qualm of conscience, and declares it with frankness : We are oft to blame in this, — 'T is too much proved, that with devotion's visage, And pious acting, we do sugar o'er The devil himself. This, it must be owned, is a home thrust in every sense. Accordingly, the King, whom Polonius is addressing, pro- claims his portion in the race by this profound mea culpa : "0! 't is too true ! how smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience /" The worthy chamberlain is, for all this, not the more nice in other matters. Among the practices which he considers not demeaning to his son, and which he says are " companions noted and most known to youth and liberty," are : " drinking, fencing, swearing, quarrelling, drabbing," — ■ of all or most of. which it is perceived why he is naturally tolerant. The conformity of the following, in both coarseness and immorality, is not so easily conceived in a polished courtier and a grey-haired parent. When he is planning the meeting mentioned between Ins daughter and her princely lover, he expresses himself in this ' language, also spoken to the Queen : At such a time, I'll loose my daughter to him : Mark the encounter : if he love her not, etc. SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 209 But though the image here suggested he no less evident than ohscene, perhaps the poet meant no worse than the naivety of the Teuton manners. 1 In the test, in fine, of sel- fislmess, Polonius has left a maxim which must he held the most successful of Shakespeare's gihes upon the character : for, to the contrary of disrespect, it is hecome a moral axiom. It is the famous parting precept to his son, who leaves for Paris : To thine own self he true ; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou can'st not then he false to any man. It is another contresens, by which the admirable humourist displays the bathos of the diplomatist, as in the "circum- stances," and the " centre." The meaning is : be intensely selfish, and it must follow, in a certain manner, that you will then be social, just and generous. And this gentilitial manner of the sequence is illustrated by the logical connexion between the night and the day, winch are so far from mutual conse- quence as to be contraries to each other. 1 It is well known that in the American courts of justice, any ques- tions ahout nameless acts or parts of the hody must he shaped for German witnesses of the lower class with the utmost caution, as these people would respond with categorical unconsciousness. On the contrary, with the Irish of a similar class, the lawyers amuse themselves by seeming not to seize their inuendos, and keeping them upon the rack for queer contortions of expression. Another contrast may be added, though scarce bearing on the text. The rag-pickers of the same country are universally Teutons ; while of the hundreds of thousands of starving Irish that have been thrown into it, not perhaps a dozen persons would have stooped to this honest calling to rescue them from perishing of hunger in the streets. No doubt, political economists will see in this distinction proof demonstrative of the superiority of the Saxon race. Let them enjov their philosophy. K 2 210 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. The King, the character next in prominence, is aptly introduced with an example of the feasibility of reconciling those repugnant interests, within the limits of the family — not to extend it to the community. King. — Though yet of Hamlet, our dear brother's death The memory he green ; and that it us befitted To bear our hearts in grief; and our whole kingdom To be contracted in one brow of woe ; Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature, That we, with wisest sorrow, think on him, Together with remembrance of ourselves. Therefore our some time sister, now our Queen, The imperial jointress of this warlike State, Have we as 't were with a defeated joy — With one auspicious and one dropping eye ; With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale, weighing delight and dole, — Taken to wife : nor have we herein barred Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone With this affair along. Act i. sc. 2. Thus the "fidelity to self," of which the speaker was a zealous votary, is found compatible with a devotion to even the family relations, but by this other mode of sugaring the devil himself, in which the Council join the monarch with gentilitial sympathy. The intellectual mark is also patent in this character. The distinction of Kenection is to see all tilings through a selfish medium. The refraction they thence receive is the sugaring in question ; for it would be a harsh mistake to take it for express hypocrisy. This systematic species belongs more to the Celtic race. A board of English brokers may, through mere instinctive yearning, or the force of routine, or the hope perhaps of pardon, com- SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 211 mence their "operations" with devotional exercises; but a Celt who should propose in such a place to " offer prayer," would be infallibly projecting the plunder of the public. The reflection of the King in this duplicity of function — the ray direct and the ray refracted in the famous image of Lord Bacon — is finely rallied or represented by the poet in the passage cited. Other specimens were above given from the Play-King and from Hamlet. There was also due propriety in the choice of the present quibbler, the King being, as the Ghost says, a man " with witchcraft in his wit" — a notion furthermore, respecting intellect, no less befitting a warrior race. The test of Conscience has been already incidentally exemplified ; indeed, this fratricide is no less full of it than Richard III. He thus confirms the conclusion that it was not crime, but race, that precluded all allusion to the principle in Macbeth. The Scandinavian murderer can even appeal to it in others. " Now must your conscience my accpiittance seal," says he unctuously to Laertes in assuaging his filial anger ; adding afterwards the kindred maxim, that •• / < " nge should have no bounds." This other personage of the piece has the same moral stamp of race. When he hears of his father's murder, he pitches "conscience and grace to the profoundest pit." And when he purposes hitting Hamlet with the sword which he had poisoned, he adds : " And yet it is almost against my conscience." In fine, the very Ghost himself does not forget this old tribunal. He enjoins Hamlet not to hurt his mother, but to leave her " to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, to prick and sting her." For the reason above explained perhaps, he does not name the conscience, the force of habit 212 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. not allowing him to connect the thing with women. So surprisingly does the poet preserve, hy instinct or by art, the complex unity of the portraiture, in the minutest shadings. 4. Eeverting now to the male personages of this order in the play of Macbeth, they will be found in due and double correlation with the two races. The principal is Banquo, a fellow-aspirant to the crown. There -was occasion to" note his intellect as dreaded by Macbeth, and for a character the opposite of the puerility of Polonius. This compact firm- ness is shewn in tbe encounter with the Witches, whom he rebukes when they hail Macbeth and take no notice of himself. In conclusion he says : Speak, then, to me who neither beg nor fear Your favours nor your hate. And when they vanish, his rationality disputes the testimony of the senses : Were such things here as we do speak about ? Or have we eaten of the insane root That takes the reason prisoner ? And by and by, he philosophises on the incident in this wise : m But 't is strange : And oftentimes to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray us In deepest consequence. The Celtic consequence and caution and causation again. It was this calculated caution that quelled the genius of Macbeth. It was by it Banquo's own aspirations were curbed or cooled, in the absence of an instigator such as SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 213 Lady Macbeth. This firm coolness and shrewd caution are brought out well amid the turmoil that follows on the alarm of the murder of the King. Banquo remains umnoved and even silent, and self-possessed enough to make the cutting comment alluded to, upon the compromising exclamation of Lady Macbeth ; but the silence declares safely his conviction of Macbeth's guilt. A curious circumstance contrasts his manners with the coarseness of even Polonius. The Court being all in deshabille, he is careful to suggest, upon inviting them to council on " this most bloody piece of work," that they should first conceal "the frailties" of their demi-nudity — in short, dress. He is also polite enough, when Lady Macbeth seems to faint, to pay attention to assisting her, as Macduff too does, with all his flurry. Of this personage, the character is Celtic in a different form — in its fervour and its fidelity or loyalty to the King. His furibund exclamations on the discovery of the murder, and his immediate retirement from Macbeth's court, display these traits. He even quits his wife and children to join the lawful heir in England, through this sentiment of loyalty, which is a form of sociability ; much rather, it is evident, than from personal fear. His bravery in the encounter with Macbeth afterwards excludes this motive. Macduff was, in short, a Celt of the Irish type, while Banquo was the very incarnation of the Scotch variety. Lennox, the sole remaining of the persons of any mark, is also strikingly of the Scotch temper, as may be Avitnessed by the following. He is talking to an un-namecl Lord : My former speeches have but hit your thoughts, Which can interpret further ; only I say 214 NEW EXEQESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. Things have been strangely borne. The gracious 1 Duncan Was pitied of Macbeth.— Marry he was dead ; And the right valiant Banquo walked too late. Whom you may say, if t please you, Fleance killed, For Fleance fled: men must not walk too late. You cannot want the thought bow monstrous too It was for Malcolm and for Donaldbain To kill their gracious father, damned fact ! How did it grieve Macbeth 1 did he not straight In pious rage, the two delinquents tear, That were the slaves of drink and thralls of sleep ? Was not that nobly done ? ay, wisely too ; For 'twould have angered any heart alive To hear the men deny 't. So that I say He has borne all things well, and I do think That had he Duncan's sons under his key, (As an 't please heaven he shall not) they should find What 'twere to kill a father : so should Fleance. But peace ! for from broad words, and 'cause he failed His presence at the tyrant's feast, I hear Macduff lives in disgrace. Act iii. sc. 7. Nothing is more keenly characteristic than this speech. The irony and inuendo have the best polish of Shakespeare's genius. What exquisite ambiguity in the phrase, " to kill a father" — the meaning being, ostensibly, the punishment of the sons, suspected from their flight to be the murderers of Duncan, but intentionally, their removal from competition for the throne, as a consequence incumbent on the veritable murderer. It is also worth remarking how, by the single term " broad," he paints the character of indiscretion just attributed to Macduff. A Scotchman would define the Irish a people of " broad words." Nor is the truth of this at 1 An illustration of the import above assigned this epithet, as the irony of the present speaker revolves precisely on that significance. SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 215 variance with the caution assigned the Celt. The caution is the result, as explained, of rationality, which must of course be brought into play by an object. In default of such pro- vocative, the conduct is frank. Both the phases may be witnessed upon a large scale in the earliest acquaintance of special history with this people. While the Gaids could keep so close as by conspiracy to raise the country repeatedly in insurrection against the presence and power of Caesar, they never could employ the least stratagem or feint in war. 1 The 1 Caesar himself reiterates this remark. Hirtius, too, says : " Gallos homines apertos, minimeque insidiosos; <\mper virtutem, non per dolum, dimicare consueverant." — (De Bell. Afric. L. xxiii.) The word apertos paints the character quite happily. Strabo adds to a like testimony the judicious reflection, that for this reason, notwithstanding their bravery, they were easily vanquished by stratagem or treachery. Csesar likewise explains to bis army, on the eve of encountering Ariovistus, that the Germans overcame the Gauls, not by arms, but by stratagem ; that is to say, simply, by withdrawing within their marshes, to leave the ardour of the Gauls to break itself -with impatience ; and then, as they dispersed, to fall upon them in disarray. It is a strategy not yet extinct in their diplo- macy and politics. Is not Austria pursuing'it at this moment in war itself? If Ai-iovistus were the only example left by history, tbe case would hardly be sufficient to warrant such a contrast. It is proper, then, to add a few of the positive testimonies. Cassar, speaking of other hordes of them, says: " Eddem (same as before) et perfidia et simidatione usi Germani.'' Pomponius Mela says generally of the Germans : " Jus in viribus babent, adeo ut ne latrocinii quidem pudent": the inference is philosophic, and the true explanation. Paterculus says: "At illi (Ger- mani), quod nisi expertus vix credat, in summa feritate versutissimi, natumque mendacio genus,'' etc. It was this untried appearance, the air of bonhommie, that imposed upon such as Tacitus, who knew this people but at a distance. Ammianus, among other passages, has : " Gotbos ssepe fallaces et perjidos.' 1 The habitual phrases by which Nennius characterises the Saxons are : " Vulpino more, viper ina mente." 216 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. conspiracy was a thesis proposed to the reason ; the warfare was an issue for physical bravery and force. On the contrary, in this, as all the rest, with the TeutoiiSj who were treacherous by impulse, and honest hut by reflection. It was above seen, that to turn towards, and to ward off a blow, were denoted, in their idiom, by one and the same term. " Beware of your first impulses," said Talleyrand, to a Celtic people, " they will probably be generous, and therefore impolitic"; a Gothic Talleyrand would have cautioned against the second, knowing the first would take care of themselves. The first encounter of the great Eoman general just mentioned with a Teutonic people, under Ariovistus, is marked by a repeated attempt to assassinate him ; while, on the other hand, the race could never, even to the present day, combine by other than confederacies, that is, unions merely physical, or rude conglomeration, The conduct, too, it must be owned, was rather conformable. Instead of meeting or standing the invasions of Cffisar, the Germans only thought of drawing him into their wildernesses. It is thus that Arminius, though educated by the Romans, was inspired to entrap Varus and his three unfortunate legions into what is the most treacherous and savage butchery on record, although ranked among the " great battles of the world "by an English author. Oivilis and Stilicho repeated the trick. There were also in these islands sometraces of the kind, as, for example, Aimsbury, Mullaghamast, and Glencoe ; to say nothing of the quack physicians kept in Ireland by Queen Elizabeth, to contrive poisoning the native chiefs who got too wary to be entrapped. India, too, the other day, threw all these in the shade, by a massacre, of which the baseness outdid even the perfidy. But all this has its excuse in the description of Mela — the principle of force, which is the justice of a warrior race. " Dolus aut virtus quisi'm hoste requirat?" said Virgil, respecting the morals of warfare. But while an English writer may be pardoned this apology, it cannot be denied that there has thus been some foundation for the famous French rallying cry about the perfde Albion. SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 217 n< it by rational combination. Thus the Teuton becomes frank, as the Celt cautious, but deliberately. And* both the facts are direct consequences from the general theory. The Gothic organism, being concentred in the individual, is instinctively distrustful of all things external, and is brought to treat them candidly but through reflection on the expediency. The organ- ism of the Celt has its centre in society ; he is therefore impulsively communicative and confiding, and must be thrown back by experience upon the individual, to derive caution from the reason, as the Teuton does from instinct. To apply this double aspect of the Celtic character to the case : The Irish have for ages been so trampled down by brute force, that reason or any other moral agency has had no play ; they therefore naturally fell back desperately on the instincts of the character, precisely as the Gauls did in the case of open warfare. The Scotch had by their unity main- tained themselves more honourably, and thus extorted treat- ment which left calculation useful. Hence the character has here retained it, though perhaps strained to that excess at which the Celtic elasticity is rather broken than bent. Both the phases are fully normal alone in the Frenchman ; who, while in his public conduct the most rationally cautious, is in his feelings, as in his face, the most unsinister man in Europe. The latter trait, without its natural correction from the former, was what prompted or permitted the " broad words" of Macduff, his impulsive demonstrations of horror at the death of Duncan, and his inability to dissemble so far as dining with Macbeth. So infinitely delicate are the con- gruities of the great painter, who is fancied by the critics to have dashed through such things at haphazard, but 218 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. who wrought with the conformity and collectivity of crystal- lization. But the main feature of the character of Lennox himself is the Celtic innuendo combined with the caution. It is the well-known frondeur spirit of French history and Paris salons. Indeed, this circumspective conduct and compensatory criti- cism is the source of the political timidity ascribed the French. If they were silent, the superficial would not think them discontented ; but when they murmur without acting, it is fancied to be cowardice. The seeming cowardice is, however, that precisely of Lennox, and even of Macbeth himself — that is, the cowardice of " consequences." As a race of sociability, the Celts instinctively rest on sympathy ; live individually, like Pope's spider, along the lines of the social tissue. They are, then, delicately careful not to commit them- selves to action, until assured by their presentiments or calculations of being supported. Hence the failures of the Irish, in their revolutionary tentatives, for want of confidence in their leaders to embody this consensus. The honest Teuton, on the contrary, who lives no farther than his own skin — or from the " conscience" that sits his council to the "castle" that shells his family — can feel no reason for refraining, when incommoded by the outer world, from that virulence of speech, which is called manly independence. The nervous action of conspiracy and organization have no meaning to him. He feels entitled to look for social repara- tion but to himself, and to the aid of any others who may have the same motives. He looks, with his own Hobbes, upon society as a state of warfare, in which all is to be wrested more or less by dint of muscle ; and thus his mode SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 219 of combination is by " meeting " and by scolding — that is, exhibiting and advertising the mass of muscle on his side. Compare accordingly, in frequently analogous conditions, the fierce and spluttering tirades of Hamlet with the stinging slyness of the speech of Lennox. The incidental and menial personages could shew little characterising. Yet there are even here some traits, but the more probatory for their casualty. A practical example of the rationalistic recklessness which Celtic impersonality was seen to sink to in its abuse, is found depicted eulogistical! y by Malcolm to the King, in his account of the death of the rebel chieftain of the Isles : Nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it. He died, As one that had been studied in Ms death, To throw away the dearest thing he owed, As 'twere a trifle. Act. i. sc. 4. The same Malcolm is also made to act the national caution, in his pretexts to Macduff for declining the throne. It was remarked that the inducements proposed to others by Macbeth were, like his own motives, always social or unmercenary. To Banquo he offers the temptation of but " honour." Even the doctor he would stimulate, not by fees, but by applause — a substitute which would be scarce effective in our age of commerce. But the climax of this trait is represented in the low ruffians whom he procures to perpetrate the murder of Banquo, and eggs on, not with money or other profit, which he never mentions, but with an art- fully contrived story of social wrongs to them from the victim. It is the feature which the leading organ of English 220 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. feeling, the Times newspaper, describes as the " insane disinte- restedness " of the Irish ; because these, in their elections, light and vote for some abstraction, instead of driving, like the English, a " snug business " in the suffrage. The imputa- tion is profoundly characteristic of the two races. The con- trast is confirmed by the calendar of crime, which with the English turns chiefly upon personal acquisition, with the Irish upon social vindication, just or otherwise. And that the poet had this principle before him systematically, may be placed beyond all question by only recollecting, how Eichard III. tempts his agents for a like purpose. " I will love thee and prefer thee for it" says he even to Tyrrell, who was an upper agent in the murders, and a " gentleman." In fine, the principal gentilitial attribute, the Eeasoning, is pushed to its last test in the child of Lady Macduff. Perhaps the subtlety and force of reason were in some part intended to paint the naive rectitude observed in the youthful mind. But in the interesting scene of this shrewd " prattler " with his mother, there is something more than Shakespeare would have given to that principle. There is nothing of the same keenness in the analogous exhibition of the boyish Duke of York, in Eichard III. The Scotch boy, then, must be re- garded as an acme to the demonstration. 5. There are certain other general distinctions between the personages, which, though rather things of colour than of character, maintain the principles. The first of these in point of importance is piety ; which, in accordance with the theory, is represented by the poet, as entirely to the credit of the Gothic play and race. The name of religion, or even of SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 221 rarely mentioned throughout Macbeth. The on< 01 other occurs constantly in Hamlet through all the persons. oiibt, the use is very commonly to "sugar over the •levil." It is also not infrequently for exclamation and even oath. Indeed, the latter is the first employment, made I hay, of God and heaven. But profane swearing is as natural as piety to a soldier race. It is an effort of muscula- tion to impress by force and fear, for want of energy in the intellect to do so by reason. It has accordingly been rela- tively slight in the Celtic race. The accession of a Celtic monarch, James I., to the British throne, was forthwith marked by the enactment of a formal law against English swearing. A practice then so universal among this people in all classes, up to his own predecessor pious and female, who swore like troopers, as to have formed the staple rhetoric of even the writers for the stage. 1 The exclamations just alhided to are a second feature of the opposition. It might be thought this inarticulate expression of the sentiments should be more common in the Celtic play, the race being what is called " impulsive " ; the Teutons are content to be deemed phlegmatic in comparison. But this is one of the " vulgar errors " and in- versions already rectified. The impulsiveness is the effect of 1 It seems, indeed, to have been installed in the Constitution itself. "Those called the Commons," (says Keith, anno 1677) "had their kind df swearing, and those called the Gentry had theirs ; so that the ordi- nary way of swearing would not serve them both. But as they (the gentry) exceeded the commons in outward greatness, so they thought it a property (propriety, or is it privilege?) to exceed them in swearing more great and terrible oaths, and these are called gentlemen's oaths." Here are then the constitutional distinctions and dualism. 222 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. susceptibility to new motives, as presented to the reason, from abroad, by social influences. To those who do not see these influences nor feel the like themselves, the variations which are the consequence, must seem a meaningless incon- stancy j while on the other hand, their own changes, coming mostly from within, from the individual principle of con- science or opinion, the fact of the occurrence is not only slower and rarer, but may also be unconscious to the con- science, which is the changer. In the race of alleged impulse, such perceive but the effects ; in themselves, they, on the contrary, advert but to the cause ; and as this which is the Conscience, the German ego, continues one, it is habi- tually insensible, as is the eye, to its own shiftings. To recognise a change of position, three points at least are neces- sary ; but the ego has but two, to wit, itself and its object. So that, while true to itself (in the maxim of Polonius), it may remain persuaded of being false to no one else, though in reality it veers to every point of the moral compass. Hence the corresponding race has passed upon itself and others, the persistency of egoism for the consistency of reason. "Whence it follows, that, on the contrary, this is really the race of impulse, that is to say, of inspiration through the sentiments or conscience ; and so, by consecpience of excla- mations, the proper language of unreasoned feeling. Quite accordingly, the divine Shakespeare has not neglected this deep distinction. While there is scarce one interjection, any more than oath, throughout Macbeth, the only one being the " horror" ! of Macduff at the murder ; a mere glance will serve to shew that there is scarce a page of Hamlet that is not cyphered with these symbols of a phlegmatic surprise. SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 22o The ghost himself is not exempted from this rhetoric of the ego ; as for instance : " Hamlet ! — wicked art — list, list ! — horrible, horrible" ! Hamlet, too, is constantly bleating this figure. Polonius alone perhaps, of all the per- sonages great and small, by an exception that lights the rule, c caught in the naivity. The old conscienceless poli- tician and coxcomical ratiocinator is surprised into this native accent but by the dagger — " 0, 1 am slain" ! How incessant this interjection is with the Germans must be familiar. And so deeply does it lie in the constitution of the race, that a Prussian philosopher has made, the other day, the principle his basis of a theory of language. 1 One alone of these minor touches has been noted by the critics, though merely as a fact, but which is equally con- formable. Coleridge has remarked, very probably after Schlegel, that while the play of Hamlet is overrun with puns, there is nothing of the kind in the piece of Macbeth. 1 M. Steihthal. Der Ursprung der Sprache. (Berlin, 1851. With the English, who have less of the primitive simplicity, the impulse seems in general kept down to the arms. This is known to the bill- distributers in the metropolis of commerce. They use the little artifice of hiding the package, and of a sudden " popping'' one into each passer's face, who is commonly surprised into jerking forth the arm, perhaps instinctively to " ward" a blow, but effectually to take the bill. — What profundity of meditation in even those merchants and mechanics, remarks some French feuilletonist come to study English character, and who is sensible that nothing but abstraction of that nature could disarm his own people of a dignified disregard. And when, continues he, we see this thinking absence in the lower classes, what must not be concluded of that terrible aristocracy who keep astride on such a people, and who overthrew Napoleon ! — This is seriously a fair example of French philosophy about the English. 224 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. And lie merely concludes that Shakespeare could abstain when he pleased ; as if he practised this low wit through mere gaite de coeur. Schlegel, somewhat less ludicrously, vindicates the use of it. He alleges that " a great fondness for it is always evinced among children and nations of simple manners ;" l by which is meant that the English of Shake- speare's day were a sort of children. Now, our Teutonic brother must not get off in that way. Macbeth was addressed to the same English as Hamlet. So were Cymbeline and Lear, which are also without punning, to the same people as the plays called historical, which are all full of it. It cannot, therefore, be referred to either the public or the poet, which are both common to the two classes, but to some difference in these classes. This great difference is, that the characters are in the former Celtic ; and in the punning category, that they are Teutonic. And that the trait could be no other than a means of characterization must have been held, even in the absence of a distinct compre- hension of it, quite implicitly by critics at all versed in 's genius. 2 The punning may be now conceived ' Lect. Dram. Lit. ch. 23. 2 Bacon, who had as keen an eye to national adaptation as Shake- speare himself is the author of a Jest-hook. It is said to have the excellence of all his writings, without the drawback of remaining unfinished. An advantage perhaps due to the fact, that the subject did not call for great expenditure of cohesion or construction. It would appear too that punning is synonymous with wit and a high mark of talent in the University of Oxford. And the prevalence, as well as poverty, of this amusement at the English bar may be judged of from the specimens recorded of even the Bench, by Lord Campbell, in his " Lives," with a touch of Scotch mischief. SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 22-~i to be, in fact, a result of the mode or stage of intellect dis- tlie muscular. This complexion loves mirth, and at the cheapest mental outlay. We have the word of another poet that "heavy dulness ever loves a joke." Lycurgus gave the Spartans penates of laughter, as buffoons had been a fixture in the Gothic castles of the middle ages. But the pun reduces wit to the lowest or physical grade ; embodies it to mere sense in the compass of a word, without tasking with the slightest intellectual combination. It is in short, the primer of the art, or Wit- Made-Easy. Hence the fondness for it in children and adult people of " simple manners," or rather of weak intellect, for this is the true meaning. Shakespeare, therefore, well designed it as a trait of a soldier race, as he does the concetti, where the characters are Italian, such as, for example, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona ; and as he generally excludes both, not only from the persons but even from the plays of the race of wit and reason, indulging but esprit, as in Love's Labour Lost. Schlegel pleads that the Greek tragedy did not disdain to admit punning. It occurs, it is believed, but in a single piece of Sophocles, and in a personage which surely puts a climax to the proof. The Greek punster is the small- brained and large-bodied Ajax, who still more strictly than Achilles was the type of the warrior character ! The candid reader is now prepared to look for colourirg and even character in ever}"- detail of this painter, down to forms of expression. Of these there are two that grate repeatedly the ear in Hamlet. The one is the word gentle- man, employed in a laudatory, not in a merely ceremonial sense ; while it occurs but in the latter, and a few times in 226 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. Macbeth. The emphasis implies a real distinction corre- sponding ; and this distinction must be a scarcity of the quality so prized, by what our law logicians call a " negative pregnant." So that the pregnancy in this case must be owned a fecund proof of the opposition already noted in point of manners between the races. As to the fact, it is notorious that, with the English as with the Americans, the term "gentleman" is thus emphatical, and more a dignity than appellation ; while its equivalent would, in that sense, be an offence in France at least. Who has not heard of " the English gentleman" in the more starch and modern form, and of the " fine old English gentleman," whose type is vanished with the age of temperance. There is no people, perhaps, in the world of whose gentlemanly qualities so much is talked by themselves and so little by other nations. Is it that nature would make up by protestation for want of practice, as in the Celt she builds up air-castles, since he will not take the land ones. The principle is simple and of universal prevalence. Whenever nations are heard habitually parading their " gentlemen," their " liberty," their " institu- tions," or any special mode of eminence, they may be held with almost certainty to be deficient in that particular. Eor with the facts on a scale so large, if they existed they would be evident, and so there would be no occasion to keep repeating them to others. Nay, they would be, like the atmosphere, insensible to those within them, who would be led to recognize them but by privation or corruption. In short, to sum up with the proverb : " A good wine can need no bush." The other term used by the incomparable poet to tint his contrast of the races is still more curiously refined. It SECONDARY CHARACTERS. 227 is no other than the name scholar, in the peculiarly English sense. The word is never found at all in the play of Macbeth. It is among the highest distinctions in that of Hamlet, and with all ranks. The officer Marcellus, on the appearance of the Ghost, says : " Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio." The critics, it is true, explain the term in this instance as alluding to a popular condition for addressing ghosts. But this they probably inferred from the case itself interpreted, thus playing themselves the trick of turning effect into cause. They should, besides, have known the origin of such a superstition could have been but the distinction of the scholar above the vulgar; for the latter are those who always had the privilege of seeing ghosts. Marcellus, there- fore, is led to designate Horatio, from himself and fellows, in the same spirit that a group of peasants, if accosted by a well-dressed stranger, will make the personage among them who has some "scholaring" their spokesman. There can, at all events, be no escape from Hamlet's own appeal of honour to his companions, as "friends, scholars, soldiers." And even of Hamlet himself, the enamoured Ophelia can say no higher than "the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, .sword." Indeed, the tongue is the felicitous distinction of the " scholar" in the English acceptation, irrespective of the thought ; at most, the tongue -with that " garnish of brains" called the memory." But such is largely the professorial philosophy of Germany. The English "scholar" is ac- complished when he halts on Greek anapaests : and so, the universities have made this faculty too common for a title of dis- tinction in the manner of the word gentleman. But in America, where things are otherwise, and by a union that tests the prin- 228 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. ciple, the highest eulogium paid a statesman, were he Pre- sident of the Kepublic, is to say that he is a " scholar and a gentleman." It is, however, being more particular than the mother country when parading George IV. as the " first gentleman of Europe." What either compliment would sound in France, with the race of reasoning and courtesy, is best inspected in the language, that faithful cast of the national intellect. Imagine, then, a grave magistrate panegy- rized as un holier ; which on the contrary, when applied other than to school-boys, means contempt. In fine, however, it does not follow that the race of Eeasoning is that of reason, or that the Teuton may not pretend to be the race of " common sense." This sort of sense is, in fact, the reason of the race of individualism — what is subjectively common to the several members of the body ; and the instinct retains here so much the animal intensity, is so uniform in its objects and so vigilant in its action, as to give to the concurrences an air of preconcertion. The reason proper, on the contrary, in compensation of its enlarged range, can apply but to the relatively common, the comprehensive, the unselfish, the abstract, and therefore often the visionary. It is ecmally at home in arraying the verbal battalions of the memorable warfare of the Omoiousion and Omoousion, as when it opened to Aristotle the theory of its own procedure. The distinction is immortalized in the apothegm of a poet who, like the women that provoked its satire, could belong but to the race of reasoning : Raisonner est l'emploi cle toute ma maison ; Et le raisonnement en barmit la raison} 1 Moliere, Les Femmes Savantes. CHAPTER V. SHYLOCK, AS TYPE OF THE HEBREW RA< E. i. This famous character is still alone, in the long gallery of Shakespeare, to be fully recognised as the expression of a race. Yet the portraiture — though far more perfect, as will presently appear, than has been hitherto conceived — is not more like than several others. It is only that the subject was more simple and less familiar. The narrow confines of the Jewish sympathies, and intellect, and action, left the discernment proportionably less distracted by multiplicity ; and then the fewness and insulation of this people throughout Europe gave the additional aid of marking them to common observation. With the Teutons and the Celts it was quite otherwise in detail. They were, the narrowest of them, far more complex in range of faculties and phases, and too familiar with each other, as with themselves, for nicer judgment. The rudest peasant may admire the cow and cottage of a Dutch painter. The very birds were lured to peck at the tinted fruit of the Greek artist. The simple characterization lay, in both, on the exterior, and 230 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. was contrasted with the nature of the spectators respec- tively. The grapes were visibly unlike the birds, the cow was visibly unlike the peasant ; the Jew was strikingly unlike the Christian, whether Celtic or even Teutonic. But most mankind would gaze for ever on a cartoon of Eaphael, with- out perceiving more than ordinary men and women in quainter costumes, or suspecting the vast interior which wrapt the meaning of the picture. The Hebrew character — this Dutch subject of the Eaphael of poetry — may be conveniently unfolded by the now-known tests of the Teutonic. Tor the Hebrews and Semites generally were a race of personality, with its effects of war, commerce, religiosity, in a word, selfishness. This analogy is indeed the cause of Teuton sympathies with Hebrew records, while the Celts revert in preference to Grseco-Boman civilization. The Semites were the liberators of primeval humanity from the paternal and religious despotism of the East, just as the Teutons were the liberators of the West from the Eoman : not by design in either case, but through destruction and rapacity. The religion of the Hebrews was a revolt of Per- sonalism against the reigning Naturalism of the family or physical worship ; its definition is the Erotestantism of heathen theology. Exactly so, the Teuton protest against Eoman idolatry might be defined the Judaism of Christian theology. The Hebrews hated Egypt no less fiercely than the Teutons Borne. They hated all the world save for pur- poses of gain, and wanted but an island in a sequestered position to have become the " chosen people " of trade and "liberty," as well as God. The preaching of the Teutons is the prophetism of the Jews ; the philosophy of the Germans SIIYLOCK. 2ol is a secular Eabbinism. In fine, the commerce and the colonising concur too strikingly to need remark, and are plain results of avidity and individualism. The "dispersion" of the Hebrew section, the disappearance of the Phoenician and the destruction of the Carthaginian are another form of the same destiny, implanted by Jehovah in the organization of the race. A thousand other consonances of the races will now present themselves. But these are sufficient, no doubt, to satisfy that we may safely employ, for brevity, the test elucidated in the Teutons by way of key to the Jewish character. The only difference is of degree — which is, how- ever, as immense as the divergence of the epochs and the development meanwhile. The Jew in mind, if not also body, might be defined an aborted Teuton ; and the Teuton, a stunted shrub grown to a cedar — but still of Lebanon. This dwarf character must needs present, then, the typic attributes in Uke condition. The Eeflection can be barely a commencement of abstraction, a mere negation of materiality, devoid of power to seize a principle. For want of this, the mind must crawl, in its procedure along the subject, clinging desperately to the language as its sole logical machinery : and hence a reverence for " what is writ," and a tenacity of national records, and an unquestioning submission to what- ever is named "law"; for all these traits (although attesting the providential channel through which the Holy Scriptures were to pass to the Christian world), yet have been also the props that have upheld the infant intellect, on its detachment from the physical trellis of the heathen symbolism : of course, the reasoning power is totally null. — The Conscience, too, could be ill developed, for it implies a higher abstraction 232 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. than that of man from physical nature, which was the stage of the Hebrews ; namely, that of soul, in turn, from its physical encasement, man. The Jews had thus no distinct notion of either soul or immortality. The rudimental conscience had barely sufficient activity to recognize the obli- gation of an express compact once for all — another trait which shows in germ the Teutonic love of contracts : the religion itself has been a compact of this nature, entered into, right commercially, with the author of their being. — The philosophy of the Hebrews was the power and passions of Jehovah, who disposed all things down to even a sparrow's fall, by express orders ; for a race of personality and muscular contention could account for no effect but by a force, a man, behind it. — The Manners, it is known and still observable, were almost animal. — As to the vicious test of Selfishness, it is a synonym with Jew. So intense, indeed, is this, that it diffused itself to the tribe, and from the tribe to the small communities which this dispersive race admitted : so that the Jew, through his mental concreteness, and the voracity of his selfishness, exhibits something similar to patriotism, if not sociability. He loves himself so all-absor- bingly, that, quite instinctively for his own sake, he loves and lauds whatever else has been called Hebrew back to Abraham. Other races, in much larger communities, do like- wise. And if in charity the fact should be presumed, in either case, to be a result of humanity, not mere collective selfishness, the notion would be promptly put to flight by the remark, of a lurking rancour to every nation that opposes their meanest interests. ■j:»:: 2. Shakespeare's pencil in painting Sliylock has •lipped in all these principles. The mental, as giving form to the rest, will he most marking. It commences with the very entrance of the personage upon the. stage, in act of uttering characteristically : " Three thousand ducats." For when informed by the borrower, of the time and surety successively, he feels it requisite to repeat each, to help along the apprehension ; as is attested by Ms adding " well," to say that he now understands. He then repeats again the three particulars together, by Avay of linking or lumping them in his mind, through language : "Three thousand ducats for three months, and Anthonio bound." Accord- ingly on after mentioning the ducats Avithout the months, he corrects himself as if omitting an integral portion of his notion: "I had forgot'" — three months— you told me so." And this lias also the effect of reassuring him of the terms. Your answer to that ? repeats the borrower Bassanio, who had already asked, without attention from the absorbed Jew. But Sliylock still, instead of noticing, goes on to talk as if to himself, and of the sufficiency or the "goodness" (in broker's ethics) of the surety. And this he does, not, as is conmionly supposed perhaps, from shrewdness, but from the slowness and the shmness of his capacity of comprehension. His power of logic is displayed admirably in the argu- ment for usury, which takes the infant form of a parable or precedent : Shy. — When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban's sheep— This Jacob from our holy Abraham was- — (As his wise motber wrought in bis behalf) The third possessor— ay, be was the third. L 2 234 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. Here the feeble intellect confounds itself already, distracted by the patriarchal lore of the Jewish brain. At the end of the first line, it falls away from the proposition, into the pedigree of Jacob, diverted doubtless by a twofold circum- stance ; the one to aid itself by the usual thread of narrative of the nation; the other circumstance, the vanity of bringing in the holy Abraham. It then breaks off to a new subject and parenthesis in the third line. In the fourth, it recrosses to the topic of the second, the genealogical pro- pinquity of Jacob to Abraham, but so confusedly as to mis- take the word " possessor" for successor. It may be, also, that the poet designed a Jew should deem them one, or that possession and existence were convertible in his sentiment. In fact, when Shylock, disappointed of his pound of flesh and principal, is menaced with the loss of his whole property, but pardoned personally, he is made to decline this, and tell the judge to take " life and all," saying : " You take my life, when you do take the means by which I live." At all events Shylock' s reason is quite exhausted at this point, and has completely lost the trace of what lie purposed in the opening line. He can but turn with the mere instinct of a hound that has lost the trail, and resume the ruptured end, repeat- ing : " Ay, he was the third." This may call to mind the similar expedient of Polonius : " Then, sir, does he this * * he does * * "What was I about to say 1 I was about to say something : where did I leave 1 At closes in the conse- quence, suggests Eeynaldo. At closes in the consequence, ay, marry," etc. But while Polonius is made to stumble in a ratiocinative sequence, Shylock fails to keep the tenor of simple statement from line to line. It is a singular obser- SHYLOCK. 235 vance of the ratio between the races. At last, Anthonio interposes, to relieve the halt of Shy lock. " And what of him (Jacob), did he take interest ?" Thus replaced upon the track, the Jewish expositor still proceeds, by repetition of the question, until he gropes himself a footing. Xo, he answers, Xo, not take interest; not as you would say, Directly interest ; mark what Jacob did. He naturally thinks the hearers must exert,' to comprehend him, the same labour of attention that he is tasked with him- self. When he at length has waddled through a recital of the Yankee trick whereby the nephew got possession of the pro- duce of the uncle's flock (no doubt a sacred type and presage of the genius of the race of commerce), the conclusion or application is presented in this wise : This was a way to thrive, and he was blest ; And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not. The formal stealth would be against the commandment, the writ, and more probably against a moneyed Jew than in his favour ; the " thrift is blessing" explains the union of trade and religion in all such races. But when Anthonio again, to bring this rambling to the point, enquires if he means to argue for the legitimacy of interest, I would assimilate his gold and silver to the ewes and rams of the patriarch, the answer is : "I cannot tell ; I make it breed as well." In other words, he can say nothing of the analogy, because a principle ; although it was the vague purpose of his intro- ducing the rigmarole ; but he can answer for the physical fact, that he makes his money beget him more. It is pre- 236 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. cisely as your practical men of business and even science would avow sneeringly, that they knew nothing of " abstrac- tions," but dealt in "facts." And when Anthonio presses Shy lock with a vehement retort, he seems unconscious of what was said, and rejoins only in a manner that shews his mind to have run meanwhile upon the breeding of the money : Three thousand ducats — 'tis a good round sum. Three months from twelve ; then let me see the rate. This arduous proposition of subtraction is admirable. But the beauties of the portraiture are infinite and indefinible. Another instance may be cited of his aversion, if not unconsciousness, to even the simplest mode of reasoning, and his retreat from it to the fact. When he mentions, in aggravation of the rebelling of the daughter, that she is his " flesh and blood," and the objection is made : " Out upon it, old carrion, rebels it at these years ?" instead of minding the argument, he but repeats the physical fact, or what to him is quite the same, the Biblical metaphor : " I say my daughter is my flesh and blood." To the same mental imbecility, and not to prudent disregard, should be also put his answer to the eloquent invective pronounced in court against his obduracy in insisting on the bond : Till thou canst rail the seal from off my bond, Thou hut offend' st thy lungs to talk so lovd. Thus the loudness is all that strikes him as appealing to the senses, and he fears but for the likewise physical constituent of the bond, the seal. To all else he is as a savage who is lectured by a sizer missionary, on the subject of the indi- visible unity of the Trinity. But the most exquisite example SHYLOCK. 237 of this intellectual concreteness is furnished by the poet in Shyloek's use of a single word. The Hebrew never names his favourite and most familiar object by the singular, as common, but by the plural term, monies. This is probably supposed to mark the sentiment of a miser, who tends to magnify- by multiplying his treasure, even verbally. But the effort was the contrary, at all events with the Jews, who had learned from the hypocritical depredations of the Christians, to dissemble almost instinctively the measure of their wealth. In fact, the poet does not, accordingly, omit this trait in Shylock ; who, when aroused from his rumina- tion on the way to entrap Anthonio, pretends that he was casting up in memory his " store," and that he finds the poor reserve to be unequal to the sum required, but that the deficit can be supplied him by a Hebrew of his tribe. It therefore was not ostentation that suggested the term " monies." It was the mental imbecility that could not rise to the abstract notion — or rather to the mere unity of physical collectivity — but clung and crawled among the multitude of individual coins, with which, besides, the Jew, from counting them, would be familiar as with his fingers. Savages, in speaking English, can scarce be ever brought to employ the form men, but continue to say mam. So children also give their first treasure the distributive name of " pennies," and come but later to the term pence, though it be singular in merely form. The child-like argueings of Shylock are likeAvise operated in this manner. He cannot move a single step, it has been seen, on even analogy, because the terms are abstractions, though mere relations between two objects. But these 238 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. objects themselves he can proceed upon by bare comparison, at least by aid of that repetition which is a mental vermicu- lation. The following is a fair example of this logical forte of his, and also of the duly Biblical construction of his style. He is talking to Anthonio, the borrower or rather surety, whom, upon seeing him in his power, he takes occasion to remind, malignantly, of the contumelies and other prejudices formerly received from him : Shy. — Go to, then, you come to me and you say, Shylock, we would have monies ; you say so ***** What should I say to you ? Should / not say, Hath a dog money ? Is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats, etc. And again to the same purpose of splenetic recrimination : " Hath not a Jew eyes 1 Hath not a Jew hands 1 Hath not a Jew organs, dimensions, senses," etc. etc. " Is he not fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons," etc. etc. " as a Christian ?" Thus he is able to crawl materially from one to one of these minute objects, through their physical amassment in a single body and this his own. His " pound of flesh," however physical, yet being in some sort an abstraction, he cannot contemplate without referring to the physical origin and operation : " A pound of man's flesh, taken from a man.'''' The same impotence pursues him in relation to place and time : " Go with me to the notary, seal me there," etc. " And when you hear the drum, clamber not you up to the casements then." To have draggled his sublime intellect through the mire of these minutenesses is, without paradox or pun, the highest flight of Shakespeare's genius. SHYLOCK. 239 To shew that he does not at all exaggerate the Jewish style, a few verses may at random he cited from the Bible. The good book opens at the narrative respecting Noah's ark : 1. And he sent forth a raven which went to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth. 2. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground. 3. But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth; then he put forth his hand and took her and pulled her in unto him INTO THE AEK. This of course was the style of writing best befitting a book designed for the self-instruction of the rude and childish multitude. It is even to be noted that the qualities most lauded in our English composition — its simplicity and solidity — appear to have been formed on this venerated model, if it be not a concurrence from analogy of race. 1 1 Take for example a book so recent as Eobinson Crusoe. The language is as simple, the figures are as few and physical, the move- ment of the style is as reptative and terre a terre as those of either Shylock or Genesis. And yet this is the most popular work in English literature, and, indeed, the most national that ever perhaps was penned. It is a singular embodiment of all the main features that have been signalized in the Teutons of the English branch. With a subject essen- tially and professedly philosophical, there is not a ray of mind above sporadic reflection. Conscience is constantly and duely its handmaid. Both are here in their glory, as occupied with self alone. And accord- ingly, the gusto with which Robinson revels in tbe use of the word meum, unencumbered by the tuum, would repay a perusal to the readers of the foregoing pages. It is my cave — my castle — mm/ crop — my goats — my bread, etc., etc. ; as if he was surrounded by encroaching possessors. There is not, at an average, perhaps a line of the entire work that does cot offer the reiteration of mine, or /, or me. Hence a large part of tbe 240 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAEESPEAEE. 3. The Conscience or moral principle of Shylock and the Jew in general was found too weak for any influence unless concentrated by a symbol. This symbol is a contract import- ing personal consent. The moral life of the Hebrew is com- posed of three such bonds : A bond or covenant with Jehovah, which is the rule of his religion ; a bond or com- pact with his fellow-citizens, which is the law or special contracts ; a bond or contract with himself, which is a vow or oath. Whatsoever can be brought within the letter of these authorities, he bows to without demur, for he imagines no alternatives. To all beside them, he is insensible by physical necessity, they being successively the sole props of his slender understanding. Hence the desperate tenacity of Sbylock to his bond, and which is wrongly ascribed to avarice or vengeance alone. There is no less of imbecility than passion in his obstinacy. To his mind, there is no reason outside the bond why he should relax it. It is but natural, that, when advised to have a surgeon at his charge to stop the wound he hopes to make from bleeding to the victim's death, he coldly answers : " Is it so nominated in the bond"? " No, but you do it for charity," continues the Judge. With apparent insensibility to the bearing of the suggestion, and with that feeble pertinaciousness to the fact, so much exem- plified, he answers : " I cannot find it ; 't is not in the bond "; national relish for this book. Indeed, this islander is a type of the Eng- lish nation and history. Nor need one now except his mode of planning business ex re natd. Thus for instance, while taking care to bind the savages by a contract, he sends it to them to be signed, as if they had the skill or implements. Also, -when he builds the canoe a furlong inland, without thinking, till his labour is expended, how to launch it. For such as this might perhaps happen even at this day in London. SHYLOCK. 241 for by "it" is meant the hiring of the surgeon, not the charity. And what must leave this view unquestionable is the conduct of Shylock, a moment after, on mention of the mere name of law. Before the shadow of this higher bond, he recedes, as is familiar, step by step from his " pound of flesh," from his " principal thrice paid," from the bare principal itself, from his whole property and even life, without appearing to imagine any more iniquity in such a law than he admitted in his own quite contrary persecution the moment previous ! He is as abjectly resigned as he was insolently resolute — which are the habitual alternatives of ignorance and weakness. But Shakespeare, in this profound scene, not only paints mankind in general, where the infir- mities alluded to occur by accident or organization ; he more- over reflects more light upon the sanctity of the Hebrew law, than has been lent by all the ponderous exegetists of his nation. This nation itself, from the analogy explained, pre- sents a measure of the same reverence in its attachment to legal forms ; whereas the Celts would, every man of them, set up his reason against the law. The other Jewish obligations, namely, religion and oaths, are brought but little into play by the conditions of the action. The religion of the Hebrews was immersed in their national law ; and the law of this procedure was the profane one of Venice. As to the oath — the bond or covenant con- tracted with one self — it is, agreeably to deduction, appealed to frequently by Shylock. One example is peculiarly signi- ficant, and may be sufficient. When Portia, as judge, is highest in grace with the Jew — is, on awarding him the pound of flesh, a " second Daniel come to judgment," — she 242 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. takes occasion of the favour to urge him to a compromise. Unable to reply as usual by appealing to the bond, of which the force seemed just bestowed by the discretion of the suppliant ; and driven thus from one attachment, he falls back upon this last plea. He answers therefore unctuously, by the exclamation : " An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven !" It was in similar predicaments that Hamlet also thought of religion. 4. The test of Manners — by which is understood, as heretofore throughout these pages, not modes of fashion but of feeling — is scarcely traceable in Shylock. His range of sentiment, as of intellect, is too contracted and monotonous. This condition, to the opposite of what might be supposed, made the analysis in general extremely difficult in this character : it is like trying, in Johnson's simile, to carve a head upon a cherry-stone. There is, however, a valid index to the manners of the Jew, and which would equally apply, of course, to all the other characters, if direct action or expression had not rendered it unnecessary. The allusion is to imagery, which, in nations or individuals, may be regarded as a livery of the character and intellect. Thus, in England and America, the tropes and even comparisons are mostly drawn from navigation and commercial or mechanic life. The usual source in ancient Eome was the military and agricultural. In Judea, it was the pastoral and its chief act of propagation — of which accordingly the sole simile of Shylock is an instance. This personage will also reveal his feelings in his allusions. One example will suffice to give a clue to this new aspect. The judge asks him why he would 243 not rather accept his principal several-fold than to insist upon the pound of flesh, which could be of no real value to him. He answers : "What if my house be troubled with a rat, And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats To have itbaned? What, are you answered yet? Some men there are love not a gaping pig ; Some, that are mad if they behold a cat ; And others, when the hag-pipe sings i' the nose Cannot contain their urine ; etc. ***** Now for your answer. As there is no firm reason to be rendered, Why he cannot abide a gaping pig ; etc. [And here he repeats, as usual, the entire list] So canl give no reason, nor I will not, More than a lodgd hate and a certain loathing, etc. The hate and loathing, of which the object is Anthonio, are as happily descriptive as the impotence to give a reason. But the coarseness and meanness of the imagery was the subject. The dog he had already fancied in the function of lending money. He also compared thieves and pirates to " land rats and water rats" ? In fact, the rat, the cat, the clog, are the familiars of the Jew ; they are companions of his isolate and indoor mode of life ; they are, like him too, pre- daceous, and objects of persecution. They naturally then occur to him as illustrations in his rhetoric. 1 His house is also a like topic, nor does Shakespeare overlook it : for with the Jew, as with the Teuton, his house is his castle. With the former, however, it is rather a cave. 1 An English poet, who was reading his manuscript to Dr. Johnson, came upon the phrase : " Shall I sing of rats " ? " No" ! was the thundered interruption of the critic. 244: NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. 5. The test, in fine, of Selfishness (which such a sentiment may introduce) is so notorious both of Shylock and his nation as to need no comment. It is rather, indeed, exaggerated in the aspect of acquisitiveness. This by no means is the stock ; it is an off-shoot among several others, such as liberty, de- structiveness, pertinacity, revenge. To some of these — whose common source is the complexion termed Personal — the Jew will sacrifice upon occasion even the appetite of avarice, which seems exclusive hut because the sole one that his debility can gratify. The very action of the present play is made to turn upon this truth. Shakespeare, or the mythic instinct from which he borrowed this tale too, could never have conceived the purpose of exhibiting a Jew's avarice — any more than the duplicity of a prostitute or politician, a thing already proverbial in the days of Aristotle. These are platitudes of plot, but for the dawbers of the stage. The master uses them but as the colouring, the mental costume of the characters. The spring of action, the causation, must be something, on the contrary, that seems at variance with this current reputation in the chief personage. 1 And this quintessence of dramatic interest derives its virtue, not from surprise, but from suggestion of something deeper and unexplored in human nature. For though the object of the drama of antiquity and exteriority might have been properly defined to be, to excite pity and terror, these puerile ends, alone attainable in puerile ages and puerile intellects, must have been deepened, with the modern drama of inferiority and explanation, into the purpose of instil- ling philosophical information. Accordingly, the great i 1 See Introduction, 8. 2, and chapter 1, at the close. SHYLOCK. 245 of this aesthetic revolution makes all his masterpieces turn on the indicated contravention — on the defeat of the " ruling passion" by something deeper in the character, and which unfolds to meditation a new vista in reconciling them. Thus, in Plamlet, who is the type of a race of muscle, action, violence, the expectation is, that he would of course rush instantly, and without instigation, to the object of his vengeance ; an expectation well responded to in making him impatient with the mere statement of the provocation, that he might fly to work, like thought. The surprise is, to see he does not, but falls forthwith into evasion, conjuring dila- tory pretext after pretext of the flimsiest kind. And the surprise is wrought up gradually to that peculiar sort of interest which marks this play, by the very flimsiness and eccentricity of the alleged obstacles. For were they things to bar the deed, or fixed at all events in mena or principle, the main interest of the piece would from that moment have been ruined. - The common mind must think it knows whatsoever it can name, and the unknown, as has been shewn, is the attraction of the drama. The nameless vagaries of Hamlet perplex and please, then, with the mystery to which they point, by his own direction, as "something in him that passes show." But the philosopher, by his analysis, comes to precipitate them into selfishness ; and this in turn is now resolved into the gentilitial character. Then, this character of personality or social antagonism is found at bottom the common principle of the contending motives — of the violence and the vengeance that would impel to the destruction of every creature of human image, this badge of rivalry and intrusion, and of the vaguery and vacillation which restrain 246 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. them through dread of danger. This profound balancing of the character is far less happy in Eichard III. This prince is brave to brutality, and his hypocrisy is too transparent. Accordingly the sole interest is the eloquence of the poet, the historical importance or prestige of the action, and the monstro- sity of the character, which strikes the vulgar like a wild beast. He is too bad for even the Norman variety of the Teutons. In Macbeth, the representative of a race of sociability, and thus of loyalty, of humanity, refinement, and reason, the presumption was against murder, and more especially of his king. The play of the action lies, accordingly, in his over- coming these known dispositions, by something else in the same character of which the nature was mysterious. And hence, the witches and their promptings to symbolise this mystic nature, now resolved into another phase of the same principle of sociability. So in Shylock, too, the piece is made to turn, not on the avarice, but, to the contrary, on the seeming disinterested- ness of a Jew ; upon his willingness to sacrifice ten thousand ducats for a scrap of flesh ; on the suspension of the ruling passion by a passion more mysterious. And here occurs an illustration of the principle pro- pounded. The part of Shylock, in fact, loses in real dramatic interest, in proportion as the counter agency is made familiar by the name revenge. The poet accordingly, and indeed before him the popular story, was led to darken it, by limitation to the Christians, thus connecting it with religious mystery. The truth is, however, that the Christians were not more objects of Jewish hatred than the Egyptians, Babylonians, and all their other earlier neighbours. It is SHYLOCK. 247 only that the Christians better knew it towards themselves ; and, it might perhaps be added, better earned it also. The sentiment was general towards all mankind outside Judea. not excepting the conterminous communities of the same race : for the races now named warrior are the only ones of history that push their personality into hostilities towards their brethren. This Hebrew hate it was that Tacitus ascribed co the early Christians, mistaking them for being a Jewish sect or emanation, and which he designated so pro- foundly as an odium generis humani. Now, it is in this its natural and philosophic amplitude, that the affection should be dramatic, according to the doctrine ; it was so shewn in Hamlet, by resolving it into his race. But this advantage of vague mystery was countervailed, in the case of Shylock, by unacquaintance with the fact in a Christian public beyond themselves ; for the condition of the audience must be a datum with the dramatist. Still, however, the great Shakespeare tends, in consonance with the principle, to push the animus of the Jew beyond the Christians, towards its source, in the fierce selfishness explained above to be the mother of revenge. Thus, after specifying his hatred of Anthonio as Chris- tian, Shylock adds : But more for that, in low simplicity, He lends out money gratis, and brings down The rate of usance here with us in Venice. Here is the kernel of the Hebrew grievance. How exquisite the pleonastic particularity of the last line, as expressive, of the area of the usurer's concern ! And when Anthonio. rebuking this, interrogates him captiously : 248 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. Do all men kill the thing they do not love ? The reply is the sublime of the Israelitic virulence : Hates any man the thing he wotild not kill? The sentiment is also well described in the passage cited, where Shylock says he can give no reason for his antipathy to Anthonio other than a "lodg'd hatred" and a "certain loathing." The reason, which is a repetition of the fact, is no less characteristic of the Jew than of the woman. But the language paints the trait back to its source in organiza- tion. The comprehensiveness of the virulence is pointedly suggested in the confidential scene with his fellow- tribesman Tubal, where it spreads into a mania of indis- criminate malevolence. " No ill-luck stirring, Tubal ; none, but what lights on my shoulders." And then this personage proceeds to solace him with the misfortunes of Anthonio — interlarding them alternately with references to the daughter, and thus exhibiting, in the abruptness of Shylock's passage between joy and grief, the liveliest picture of the joint puerility and malice of the character. In fine, the trait that wraps the nation in the selfishness of each member is not omitted by the poet, in the portraiture of Shylock. " The curse never fell upon our nation until now," exclaims the Jew, when the daughter has absconded with the jewels and ducats. And he proceeds to add : " / never felt it until now." It is the key supplied by Shake- speare to the Hebrew nationality ; and it would equally be found to open other boastful patriotisms. It must be needless to add a syllable in more explicit proof of the identity of Shylock with the entire Hebrew SHYLOCK. 249 family. It would but tend to incur idly the suspicion of partaking in the vulgar vituperation of an unfortunate and useful race. It is pretended that Shakespeare had a strong aversion to the Jews. The thing was natural in one of his large sympathies as well as intellect. The injustice in him and others was to class them with the higher races, and then to charge them with their shortcomings from this hypothetical criterion. It is, however, but an extreme case of an illusion as yet general, and which the tenor of these pages may press on systematic thinkers. CHAPTEE VI. CONCLUSION. THE RACE OF SHAKESPEARE. 1. It has been seen from the last chapter, that if profundity of portraiture implied the special sympathy which emanates from race ; if it were true that, as Pope sings, He best can paint it, who has felt it most ; then, the title of the Jews to a brotherhood with Shakespeare would be, so far, fully equal to the Celtic or Teutonic. The conclusion therefore is, that the poet was indebted to such organic assistance in none of the cases, and that the singular equality of his penetration and power in all can be ascribed but to the comprehensiveness or universality of his genius. But then, this universality could, by the law of progres- sion, have occurred but in the highest of the races concerned. This would be the case though the series were simple ; for even then, whereas each of the secondary terms would effec- tually include and might interpret all below it, the superior or succeeding must be above its comprehension, and all the stages be conceivable alone by the supreme race. But the series is, moreover, not direct, simple ; it is complex. It CONCLUSION. 251 consists in each stage, as has heen seen, of three elements, two of which are antagonised, and the third opposed to both as mediator. These conditions mnst impose on the subor- dinate constituents a further restriction of their scope of comprehension. This sphere of sympathy extends, then, even in the lower terms, not to all, but to the corresponding race in each stage. For example, the highest genius in the Teutonic race must always fail to understand the Italic race, though lower ; because it is antagonized with and thus exclu- sive of its specialty : it must pass down into the system of the antecedent stage to find its proper analogue, the Semitic or Hebrew race. Hence respectively the sympathy and the antipathy of ages between the Teutons and those races in the matter of religion — this instinctive and most infallible of all expressions of organization ; also in their whole history, as could be easily evinced So, on the other hand, -with the Italic race respecting the Jewish, which it must overstep in turn, to interpret a lower element. What this may be, it was no part of the present pages to unfold, beyond assuring that the whole system is a deduction from general history. Suffice it therefore to suggest, that the Eomans, again in religion, patronised the cult of Ids, as they did after of Mary, and persecuted or neglected that of Jesus and of Jehovah. As to the third and mediatorial or synthetic race, it must be capable, on the contrary, as concentering these extremes, of comprehending both alike, and through them mediately all their analogues ; it is the head of the resultant diagonal of the whole series. Furthermore, this key of the historical progression gives alone to the supreme race the comprehen- sion of even itself. This consummation is attained in the 252 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. methodical or reasoning faculty ; which would he hest perhaps distinguished as that intellectual position from which the reasoner himself is seen and judged like other ohjects : and in the case of the race in question, the mental organism hecomes a virtual summary of all the antecedent stages. But this position of rationality, universality, sociability, has "been perceived to he organically that of the Celtic race ; and the power of representing this race, with all the others, to he a specific distinction of the genius of Shakespeare. There are also direct arguments and facts in confirma- tion. His spontaneous flow of wit, the exuberant and graceful fancy, the airy delicacy of the sprightliness, the inexhaustible and various eloquence, are each, not merely in degree, but very really in kind, and vastly more so, all united, quite peculiarly Celtic. Throughout the entire Teutonic family especially, there is not one writer, unequivocally genti- litial, Avho presents not only all, but any one of them, in high perfection. There, the wit as far as natural is muscle-shaking diollery, to which they give the name of humour, as if an oozing from that coarse tissue ; on aspiring beyond this, it sinks to smut or to buffoonery, as Shakespeare has, accord- ingly, been often forced to do, for. them. The irony, which is so playful in this poet, as in the Celt, is in the Teuton found contorted to what the French call surnois ; it is sinister, sub-acrid, and savouring of " sour krout"; in a word, like the wit, an inspiration of beer, not Bacchus. So the fancy is phantasmagoria, the sprightliness impertinence, the eloquence declamation, and even as such, monotonous. Tor, as being the most self-centred or subjective of races, the Teutons are least capable of self-projection into varied forms. CONCLUSION. 253 Hence, moreover, their inaptitude for all dramatic poetry, the lyrical being their appropriate department, as with the Hebrews. Their efforts of the former kind, though often meritorious, are really artificial, are imitations of the Greeks, French, Spanish. Addison and Schiller are the highest of the description, and it would task a skilful critic to prove their excellences Gothic. Yet this impotence of objective conception is not all ; a vastly greater obstacle remains in the construction, the orgauization of such concep- tions, wliich is the essence of the drama. Quite accordingly, to this day of cultivation and competition, the English playwrights can construct the simplest farce but on French patterns. It is, indeed, in this supreme faculty of construc- tion or synthesis, that the genius of Shakespeare seems pre-eminently un-Teutonic ; for however irregular, on purpose to suit its public, that genius has evinced, by its variety and facility, and even by the fact, as in Macbeth and Cymbeline, that its powers were amply equal to the most exacting audience. Who could even conceive Shakespeare forced to break off in a piece, and after years of renewed effort, to leave it still a "fragment"; as befell the great Goethe in the solitary instance wherein the race has ventured in this line, beyond its leading strings ; and as befell the greater Bacon in Ms logical system, and Newton himself in the solar, and so of all others 1 And this, so far from being a defect, is the genius of the race ; a race of fragmentation, of analysis, of parts — not wholes ; as Goethe has so well charac- terised his Mephistophiles. It is accordingly in due conformitj/ with the nature of lyric poetry, which is personal, prophetical, disorderly, 254 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. dithyrambic. In this desultory composition, the Teutons excel, and also in description, which is crawling, not con- struction. All their original poetry really oscillates between these opposites, <; from the high lyrical to the low rational," from Cowley to Crabbe. The happy term "low" mates a pregnant distinction between the rationality called common sense and the intellectual. In fact the " Lake school," which Byron has so keenly circumscribed, consisted of a jumble of those apparent contraries. The latter or "low rational" is now, it seems, the uppermost. It is dissected well in a late number of a Scotch Eeview, 1 and designated happily as "microscopic poetry"; though the writer describes it as a mode of the age, instead of seeing (or perhaps choosing to see) that it is English. What confirms the close affinity between it and the " high lyrical" is the fact that both unite in the same person, as in Wordsworth, and combine their motley forces in national hostility, as they have done against Byron, Pope, and Shakespeare himself. Of course, the overpowering genius of men like these must have triumphed ; but the sympathies of England at the day were with the Dunces. Even still the several Shakespearean qualities enumerated remain topics of contumely with the English towards the Irish. They stigma- tise the fluency of this people as tongue and froth, the ever active fancy, as giddiness and levity ; the spontaneous wit, as blundering or "bulls"; and all this, without a notion that the objects of contempt are the rude germs of the genius which they so laud in Shakespeare. They would read with self-complacency the sarcasm of Byron, who declared that an 1 North British Bevieio, May 1858. CONCLUSION. 255 Irish peasant with, a glass of whisky in his head would imagine more poetry, in quality and quantity, than all the English hards of his quite prolific day. These remarks upon the personal or lyric nature of Gothic poetry bring to mind another trait which must unfit the race for tragedy. It is the absence of that loftiness of sentiment and soul which can belong but to the races of generosity or sociability. It is only in a race of democracy and commerce that a poet could dare to choose for epic hero a strolling pedlar ; the innovation is the plebeian tendency to vul- garize the venerable, to send royalty " a progress through the guts of a beggar." But Shakespeare, on the contrary, is as sublime in this propriety as he is souple to descend to the vul- garity, to meet his public. ISTot only, then, this pubhc could not well have produced Shakespeare, but the race has not produced one first-class actor of his drama, any more than it has done, it is submitted, a worthy critic. Garrick, who was born in the west of England (of which more, presently), was the most Celtic of men, down to even his silly vanity. The names of Kean, Macready, and several others, speak their Irish origin. The glorious Mrs. Siddons and her Kemble family were "Welsh. It is now seen, perhaps, why her masterpiece was Lady Macbeth ; a character, in fact, which could no more be entered into by a Teutonic woman than by a Chinese. And the argument applies of course a multo fortiori against its composition or conception in that race. To ascend a little higher : the principles of Shakespeare, both political and moral, confirm this conclusion. There is little room, for shewing such, no doubt, in the drama, which must formally exclude the personality of the author. But 256 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. there are various ways in which a bias may declare itself, and these incline in Shakespeare to the Celts against the Teutons. The opposition of these two races in the subject of politics, although this test was purposely excluded from the argument, must yet have been surmised from the co-ordinate lines of survey. The personality of the Teutons is in politics democracy ; the sociability and organization of the Celts is aristocracy : aristocracy, that is, as a hierarchy of merit • not, as in the lower races, an accident of wealth or birth. But this disposition is found imbueing the deepest sentiments of Shakespeare. The expression is decided not alone in the Celtic plays, where the doctrine might be thought to be exacted by the characters. The most emphatic declarations of it is presented in a Greek subject, and in the person of the ancient type of statesmanship, Ulysses. In the piece of Troilus and Cressida, among the latest of the author, the most mature in thought and the most conversant in politics, he gives, with habitual propriety, to this mythic politician the most eloquent and prolix allocution in his writings, to inculcate the necessity of social graduation. Some Hues may be transcribed to note the tenor of the reasoning : Ulyss. . , . degree being visarded, The unworthiest shews as fairly in the masJc. The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre, Observe degree, priority, and place, Insistance, course, proportion, season, form, Office and custom, in all line of order. * * * * * But talce degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows ; each thing meets In me&r oppugnanct, etc. CONCLUSION. 257 Then everything includes itself in power [force], Power into will, will into appetite ; And appetite an universal wolf, So doubly seconded by will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And, last, eat up itself. Act i. sc. 3. Never, surely, was portrayed in more profound and faithful colours at once the cause, the character, the career, and the end of the governments and races of conquest and muscu- larity j that universal scramble of " each for himself," as the great observer continues to strip it of the last disguise : an envious fever Of pale and bloodless emulation. Into no other passage perhaps of his whole writings has the poet so undramatically poured his heart and head He could not, had he formally held the theory of these pages, have insisted more emphatically on this contrast of race and character. For instance, the " meer oppugnancy," which marks the absence of " degree," is precisely the expedient of balances, antagonisms, on which revolve the institutions, morals, mind qf the race of muscle ; and indispensably, as in the muscular system itself. Nor is the poet yet satisfied, but makes the Greek orator return, with scarce Homeric decorum, to the charge. He is alluding to Achilles, Patroclus, and their Myrmidons, and talking to Nestor, Agamemnon, and other chiefs : Ulyss. — They tax your policy and call it cowardice ; Count wisdom as no member of the war ; Forestall prescience and esteem no act But that of hand: the still and mental parts, That do contrive how many hands shall strike M 2 258 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. "When fitness calls them on ; and know, by measure Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight — All this bath not a finger 's dignity : So that the ram that batters down the wall, For the great swing and rudeness of his poise, They place before his hand that made the engine ; Or those that with the fineness of their souls By reason guide his execution. Ibid. To which Nestor responds : Let this be granted, and Achilles' horse Makes many a Thetis' son. This sort of animus of Shakespeare is indeed throughout so pointed as to have provoked the latest of his commentators to reproof. They impute his debasement of Ajax and Achilles — his making them, as they express it, " bullies and # blockheads" — to something like an envious disparagement of Homer. These critics were misled, it may well be, by honest sympathies. The subjects drawn by Shakespeare were nearer home than Homer ; as they were, on many other unsuspected occasions. Besides, he was justified by far a deeper know- ledge of the character in question- than was possible to the great ancient. For example, he improves on him in painting Achilles as "lolling on his lazy couch"; thus hitting off a feature of the muscular complexion which, from the seeming contradiction, had escaped the Greek poem. It also escaped Horace, in his otherwise happy summary : Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer. The irritability, vindictiveness, and harshness are to the life. But the restless agitation is only half true ; the impiger is less characteristic than would be piger. The latter is accordingly what struck the mind of Shakespeare, who CONCLUSION. 259 copied liis description from the nature before him, and not from Homer's pages, as the critics would oblige him. Tacitus, who likewise is supposed a keen observer, hits remarked of the very ancestors of Shakespeare's real models : Mira diversitate natures, cum iiclem homines sic ament inertiam et oderint qidetatem? Here are the impiger and piger combined, with the general antagonism or contradiction that marks the race. The same decided predilection for order and gradation — that is, organization — is shewn repeatedly in the Celtic- plays. Thus Macbeth was made to formalize a scheme of social statics, in applying the distribution of the breeds of dog to the grades of merit. In " Cymbeline," Belario is made to protest : though mean and mighty rotting Together have one dust; yet Beverence — That angel of the world — doth make distinction Of place 'tween high and low. Nothing could be possibly more Celtic than this sublime sentiment. Indeed, the whole character of this old Morgan is amongst the most remarkable conceptions of Shakespeare, considering the little opportunity he could have had of observ- ing the more primitive or pure varieties of the Celtic type : he could have drawn its colouring but from the depths of his own sympathies. With the Teutons, the angel of the Avorld would be /rreverence — that is, democracy, liberty, negation, rebel- lion ; as it has in fact been chanted by both Milton and Goethe. Again, the disguised Imogen is asked by Arviragus : "Are we not brothers'"? — The answer of even the woman is 1 Germania, ch. xx. 260 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. still the more significant in view of the dependence and dis- traction of her state : So man to man should be ; But clay and clay differ in dignity, Whose dust is both alike. What an epitome of social and moral wisdom ! The Goth would have seen nothing hut the elemental " dust"; and, ignoring both the temper and the moulding of the clay, inferred equality in rank and race from equality in rottenness. Only turn to the "princely meditations of Hamlet, on the progress of a king through the guts of a beggar, and the dust of Alexander employed to stop a Lung-hole. Thus consistent was the contrast of the races in Shake- speare's mind, and his personal predilection is scarcely less decided. He speaks of the multitude repeatedly with con- tempt ; and what is still more significant, he sometimes expresses it by means of the distinctive attribution of the Teutons. As, for instance, "the differing multitude"; the *' still discordant wavering multitude." On the other hand, there does not occur throughout his writings a single line of eulogy upon their commonplace of " liberty." Now, if these negative characteristics, combined with the positive, incul- cating political and social graduation — nay, extending the principle to philosophical generality, as where the poet again says, in the Merchant of Venice, Nothing is good, I see, without respect [relation] — if these tilings can be shewn of any other standard writer of English race and literature, in either prose or poetry, this portion of the evidence will be foregone as null. The very prejudices of the poet appear to lean the same CONCLUSION. 261 way ; for such they rather seem to be than the mere absence of prejudice. "What really Saxon Englishman with half his opportunities, beside the vital exigence of courting public favour, had not been lavish in laudation, sincere or otherwise, of his countrymen 1 Yet nothing of the kind is ever once observed in Shakespeare. A recent editor remarks it as a singular exception to the universal custom of the writers of that age, that Shakespeare had never made a personal appeal, through the actors or directly, to the public of his audience, except on two occasions, and there by mere allusion. He seems as one who felt himself among a foreign people, of whom he had his own, and no very high opinion, but from whom he was determined to earn his bread, and to retire upon the earliest convenient opportunity. It would be per- haps going too far to call this state of feeling prejudice. But it is wonderful to see how freely he gives way to it repeatedly. Thus, in Portia's review of the various nations through her suitors, she says of the Englishman : "He is the picture of a proper man ; but who can converse with a dumb show ?" Moreover, none but a Celt could value men by their convers- ing powers ; at least, no Teuton poet, nor even Italian princess. So the word " proper " which the critics, teaching Shakespeare how to natter, would gloss by the consoling attribution of " handsome," means simply clean, well-washed, as in the French original. Again, Iago is made to charac- terize the English as " most potent in potting : your Dane and your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander — drink, ho ! — are nothing to your English." Thus the whole Teu- tonic family is brought into comparison ; as if " none but itself could be its parallel." 262 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. And, in sooth, drinking is no less characteristic of the race than eating. Their harsh, intoxicating liquors are not, as is pretended, a requisite of their climate, but of their constitution ; a supplement of spirit to their feeble nervous action, to agitate the muscular phlegmatism that oppresses them. Hence their general consumption of crude or ■windfall oranges, a gulp of the juice of which would give the tetanus to a hippopotamus. Accordingly, the Celts, however far to the North, knew originally nothing of this brutal beers and spirits, while they follow, in both hemispheres, the Teuton to the Line. Their own indigenous drink was mead, a delicate concoction, in which honey was the principal ingredient. The horse beverages have been the chief boon to them from their conquerors. They were adopted by the Irish to drown a sense of their hopeless miseries, and will be found to disap- pear as that people become themselves. The Scotch, who had not the same excuse, appear, besides, to be more persis- tent : so that their " potency in potting " is commended to those among them who desire a serious title to Teutonic extraction. In truth, however, the Scotch are no exception to the Celtic rule. They do not enter taverns to stand around like skidded barrels, as sucking and as silent, to be filled with acrid beer. Their favourite drink is whisky in some mitigated form, which promotes that social converse so dear to the Celt. And accordingly the whisky would also be disused, if the Scotch and the Irish would only combine to obtain the cheap admission of wine from the continent ; the social beverage of their chiefs in the days of independence, and the only one befitting a humane or civilized being. So, it is evident, thought Shakespeare, who was the soul CONCLUSION. 263 of sociability, and who thus proclaimed his loathing of the national propensity. He ventures even further, though somewhat less explicitly. Who can doubt of the original, for instance, of " Bully Bottom"? who browbeats his fellows, arro- gates all parts hoAvever incongruous, pretends to know all without having learned any, but prefers " the 'Ercles' vein, the tyrant's vein." The reader will remark the clinching hint of the form 'Ercles, the metropolitan pronunciation of the name of the god of muscle. 1 The rash wit attains the climax of his daring in Caliban ; this queer personage, who has been liitherto so inexplicable to the critics, but whose specific traits of "eating," "cursing," and "carousing," with his "navie"-like laboriousness, might well have prompted men less partial. Accordingly, the poet, as if to jog this obtuse bias — which he must have well known, as the stalking-horse to Ids shafts — is found, as in respect to 'Ercles, to throw in indirectly, but also unmistakeably, a guiding intimation. He makes Trinculo say naively, in allusion to the strange islander : "In EiKjlanrJ, the monster would make a man; any strange beast there makes a man." In short, it could perhaps be shewn that the history of the British island is enveloped in the mystery of this island of the Tempest. But the point was 1 Malonc, with his usual small and technical spirit, sees in Bottom but the elevated Shakespearian purpose of ridiculing " some theatrical candidate for applause." — "A theatrical candidate for applause"! exclaims Mr. Knight, with a merited contempt ; " why, Bottom is the representative of the whole human race." The English critic, although scarcely less extreme than the Irishman, is naturally less mistaken. No doubt the truth lies, as usual, intermediate the two opinions ; the mean- ing neither was an individual nor the species, but a nation — which could alone, in fact, be dramatic, as proved in the Introduction. 264 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. not to prosecute discoveries in Shakespeare; but to note the means of judging if his feelings towards the English, extravagant as they thus were, might not be properly deemed prejudices. They, at all events, were not feelings of either sympathy or respect. On the other hand, the Celts, in no one member of the race, are made the subject, not to say of caricature, but even a sarcasm. The " neighbourly charity " imputed to the Scotch is uttered in a spirit of reproof, and not of satire, and the nation is always mentioned elsewhere with praise. The noble eulogy of the Spaniards has been already noted. The French are also treated with a candid discrimination. The Welsh are represented but by foibles that are respectable ; and to an Irish weakness there is but one allusion. And this immu- nity is the more striking from the circumstance, that, at that period, the English were at open or covert warfare with all these peoples, and no less eager than they still are to hear a diatribe in their disparagement. What is more, perhaps, the religion that remains common to all or most of them, and then a bugbear with all England from the court to the crowd, is not treated once by Shakespeare with so much as a gibe ! So marked is this, indeed, that the Catholics claim the poet as of their fold. That he should have, in the circumstances, left a ground for even suspicion, is a fact that would Ayeigh strongly in support of the affirmative. But accident has, besides, furnished an insuppressible x attestation, 1 The force of this epithet and of the argument will be conceived, if it he called to mind that the forgeries of Ireland — the coarsest impostures ever passed upon even the English — began adroitly with, and perhaps, in fact, owed their success to, " A Protestant Profession of Faith, by "William Shakespeare." CONCLUSION. 265 in the form of a credo, that his father at least was Catholic. And as between the two religions there is no better mark of race. Had the illustrious More not announced it by his name, and by being the first of moderns to plan an ideal society, and even by the bom mots that followed him to the block, his Celtic blood would have been proved by being the only man in England, with the exception of one bishop, to adhere to Catholicity, against the interdiction of a licentious murderer. jSTo doubt the English changed so easily, for the like reason of race ; although they for the most part changed back- wards the next reign. But this is the prerogative, as now explained, of Conscience, which may make a thousand somer- sets and always light upon its legs. It is also the apology for the harsh judgment of Hegel, who says of the race generally, that " their religion has no profundity, and the same might be said of their ideas of law." 1 He meant their doctrinal religion, of which the charge is true. But not more true than it would be of all their other abstract notions ; and for the reason that their intellect is too concrete to conceive them unless embodied, as their laws are, in personal agents or physical processes : thus the French organization seems to this people a despotism. The Celt adheres to dogmas, for the opposite reason — besides logical consistency and social con- centration. Eor Catholicity (not the Boman, which is spiritual despotism, but the rational and systematic) is the Celtic sociability ; while Protestantism, in the genuine or Lutheran varieties, is the similar expression of personality and Teuton ism. If the character, variety, and concurrence of the foregoing 1 Philosophy of History, p. 366. (Eng. Transl.) N 266 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAKE. evidence have been considered in a candid and a philosophic spirit, the reader cannot well resist this double conclusion : That Shakespeare, were he born in the heart of Saxony, could be no Teuton ; and that he must have been a Celt, though his birth-place were Tartary. But his actual place of birth was, on the contrary, con- formable. It was not, even in Britain, in the Saxon east or south : but in the west, on the border-land of Wales and the Bristol channel ; on the banks of a river whose sweetly Celtic name had remained as if to vindicate the kinship of his genius. It is farther worth remarking, on this topic of locality, and as bearing on the specialty of the drama to the Celts, that most of the English playwrights before and at the time of Shakespeare, of any talent or distinction, were from the Celtic north and west. Such were Green, Peel, Nash, Ford, Massinger, etc. ; Ben Jonson himself was of Scotch descent, as his wit and his tenacity of the unities would countenance. It would be silly to object, that the interior of Wales and Scotland, where the race was unequivo- cal, produced, however, no sueh writers. The answer is, that they had not the language of the metropolis ; and if they had, that their confessedly belonging to a despised race would have opposed an equal barrier to their access to patronage. It was only the Borderers who could elude both obstacles, by mastery of the language and ambiguity of the extraction. Had the family of More remained in Ireland with their clan, or kept, on passing to the west of England, the Milesian index 0, their great offspring, instead of being a Lord Chancellor of England, and paraded to all time as the glory of Anglo-Saxondom, might well indeed have risen to CONCLUSION. 267 the scaffold as he did, but would have hardly descended in the memory of British annals, unless, like his kinsman " Rory," as the subject of a farce. This condition may account for the discordance of tradition with respect to even the birth-place of so many of these adventurers ; among others, two or three of the writers above named, and also in Ireland, for instance, Swift and Congreve. 1 It is indeed another of the marks of the race. The Celt, whose vanity, like all the rest, leans less on self than its surroundings, is inclined to veil his origin and his connexions when not brilliant. 2 On the contrary, the Teuton scarcely thinks of such disguises ; for in him the self-esteem is, as the word attests, quite personal. Hence the appearance, on the one side, of a vice, and on the other, of a virtue or a manly independence ; yet resulting in reality, the former from a broader, the other from a narrower range of sympathy and intellect. It would be curious to expose how fundamen- tally the current judgments respecting the two races revolve 1 Congreve, it seems to be now agreed, was only educated in Ireland. But his family was of the west of England, and so he falls into the cate- gory of epicenes. The same may be said of Swift, who, besides, was born on Irish soil ; his family, at least putative, being from the Welsh border. 2 Herodotus relates a similar trait of the Athenians, who had in his day laid aside, as being ashamed of, the name Ionians (Lib. i. 143). They endeavoured, under favour of their intermediate position, to slip from the side of the expatriated Achaaans to that of the conquering Hellens. And yet a day arrived, not many generations later, when the pretension was reversed by the proudest of these Hellens, the Spartan king Cleomenes himself. When reminded of his Doric race by the priestess of a temple, he indignantly replied : " I am no Dorian, I am an Achaean " ! What a glorious triumph of mind over muscle, brought about by the necessary course of civilization. 268 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. on this double fallacy. 1 Bat it is sufficient the Celtic foible may also serve to throw some light on a phenomenon which has been so much wondered at by critics — the scantiness of information respecting Shakespeare's life and family. So that the circumstance concurs with all the rest to the final result, that the poet was by blood as well as genius a Welsh- man ; or rather perhaps a lingering scion of the glorious Brigantes. To all the foregoing there is only one set-off, but it seems a grave one. Not more certainly is Shakespeare Celtic by his character and mind, than the dramatic innovation he effected is Teutonic. He did precisely in the drama what Locke did in philosophy, Bacon in method, and Luther in religion. Lor all these are but the normal transposition of the point of view from the exterior, the ancient and the Bomano-Italic, to the interior, antagonistic, analytical, and Teutonic. It is true there is a fundamental difference in the cases. The other innovators all propounded views of their own, expressed them independently, and imposed them on the 3 The late Serjeant Talfourd has some excellent remarks respecting the English bar, but which extend a good deal farther : " Mere stupidity (says he), accompanied by a certain degree of fluency, is no inconsiderable power. It enables the possessor to protract the contest long after he is beaten, because he neither understands his own case nor the arguments by which he has been answered. It is a weapon of defence behind which he obtains protection, not only from his adversary but even from the judge. If the learned person who presides, wearied out with endless irrelevancies, should attempt to stop him, he ivill insist on his privilege to be dull, AND OBTAIN THE ADMIRATION OF THE AUDIENCE FOR HIS FIRM- NESS in supporting the rights of the bar. In those points a sensitive and acute advocate has no chance of rivalling him in the estimation of the bystanders." — Edinburgh Eeview. 1845. p. 159. CONCLUSION. 269 public. Shakespeare, on the contrary, originated no doctrine ; he but adapted his genius to the practical expression, the embodiment by art of the yearnings of the English. In the philosophers, the revolution was indigenous and implied race ; in the dramatist, it implies nothing more than power and adaptation. Whether this, with the triple influence of education, language, literature, be sufficient to account for the discrepancy in Shakespeare, is a point that is committed to the judgment of the reader. But he should not overlook the poet's own touching testimony : Oil ! for my sake do you with fortune chide The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Thau public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it ivories in, like a dyer's hand ; etc. It will also be remarked that these scruples of dignity about the mode of " making an honest living " are scarcely English. Accordingly, so little can the English of even this clay con- ceive these moanings which the poet gave special vent to in the sonnets — where he acted but himself — that they surmise some shameful mystery ! 2. The mention of the foregoing fde of analogues to Shakespeare may, at all events, have a tendency to cast a closing doubt upon the results of a theory expounded so imperfectly. It may be wondered how a race to which those great men belonged, could be inferior intellectually to that which owns the "Welsh and Irish. Against an after- thought so plausible or so prevalent in public, it may be 270 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. prudent to prepare a final word of explanation. It will be offered most conveniently in the form of an answer to a statement of the case made in a letter just received, and which, it will be owned, presents it with fullness, force and point. The writer, a learned Irishman, whose local informa- tion was consulted on other matters, has the goodness to add : "I am astonished at the estimate which you have formed of the English character. I always believed that they — the Saxon race — were superior to the Celts in point of genius and steadiness, and reading the biographies of their Bacons, Shakespeares, Harveys, Lockes, Newtons, convinced me that there was something in the race superior to us of Ireland ; for we have never yet produced a single philo- sopher except my namesake — — , and a few others, who were certainly born in Ireland, but not of the Gaelic race. We certainly had a few remarkable characters, such as, etc. But our great men have been so feiv, that we can hardly consider the race clever, which has produced so few since the introduction of classical literature in the fifth century. The Saxon race produced a venerable Bede, who wrote the his- tory of the English Church. The Irish Church produced an Adamnan, who wrote the legendary life of St. Columba. Bede recorded great events ; Adamnan told, not lies, but absurdities which could not have been true at any time." This, it is perceived, is both peremptory and pointed, as the italics also belong to the writer. Yet it is really not discrepant with the doctrine now submitted. To begin with the end, or the outskirts and move inwards ; if the venerable Bede has recorded but events, facts, 1 it is just what his 1 This, however, it is manifest, is far from being the case. There are CONCLUSION. 271 countrymen do to this day ; but do, demonstrably through defect of the theorising faculty. The consequence of disre- garding this law and limit of the race is witnessed in the rude or transient tentatives of the Germans, who having few of the short chapters dividing his whole history without an example of the alleged " absurdities. " For instance, the shoal of miracles at Oswald's tomb and at Heavensfield — the resurrection of the Northumbrian several weeks after burial — the apparition of the Book of the Seven Seals — another, of the devil and his staff of angels — the conflagration of the city extinguished by prayer — the virginity of Ethelfrida for twenty years with two husbands— the attack on St. Germanus by the demons in the Channel — the leg of the same saint that was broken by the devil, and healed the same night by a holy spectre, which bade him walk — the blind girl restored to sight by the touch of a basket containing the relics of the said Germanus, and this, be it remarked, to the end confounding the rationalism of that wicked Celt, Pelagius ! It may be said that Cede, though implicitly believing them, is not himself the forger of these things, which is true : what he contributes is a touch of etiology or explanation, consisting of the agencies of " conscience " and the devil — two traits which are now known to be essentially gentilitial. But the apology seems equally true of St. Adamnan, and this by even the testimony of Bede himself. Speaking of the saint, the chronicler tells us, that he also " wrote a book about the Holy Places, most useful to readers ; the authority from whom he procured information was Arculf, a French bishop, who had gone to Jerusalem," etc. (Lib. v. 15.) Now, the grossest of Adamnan's " absurdi- ties " are on this subject. So that it seems the two writers must be quits as to absurdity ; and so the eulogist of Bede at the expense of his own countryman has trusted here, too, perhaps to English "biography." Lest the inclusion of the virginity of Ethelfrida among the miracles should seem to indulge anything like levity in things so sacred, it is incumbent to substantiate its claim by pointed history. It is known, then, that the Anglo-Saxon damsels of those ages, who had not the temptation of even one husband, but went in shoals to Rome to take, instead, the veil, used all to lose somehow their zone and vocation by the way. The famous Englishman Boniface, Romish legate of Germany, makes a vehement remonstrance to his countrymen against the scandal : 272 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. commenced later than the English to speculate, have not as yet acquired, an equal sense of their due province. If Adamnan has told absurdities, they were creations of imagi- nation, and the imagination is method in its infancy. "Woe, accordingly, to the youth that is devoid of imagination. It may he stuff for chroniclers, staticians, experimentalists ; but to such powers and taste, the " specious miracles" of genius, in art or speculation, must for ever remain ahsurdities. This was the experience of the first of judges in youthful promise, who brands some pedagogic pragmatists of his day as follows : " With them, jejuness is soundness, and impotence is judg- ment ; and while they think it sufficient to be exempt from gross faults, they fall into the grossest, that of wanting positive excellence." He then contrasts the youth of imagi- nation : "Thence is the hope, the promise of strength: let youth of this mind be left to dare and invent apace . . . Exuberance of fancy can be easily remedied, whereas a sterile soil is to be vanquished by no labour." 1 But Quin- Quia magna ex parte pereunt, paucis remanentibus integris. Perpaucae enim sunt civitates, vel in Francia aid Gallia in qua non sit adulter a vel meretrix gentis Anglorum. It is however but fair as well as gallant to add, that the other sex inflicted as strange a provocation. It may he offered to the reader under veil of the foreign language, and sanction of the same religious and patriotic authority : quod gens Anglorum, spreto more cceterarum gentium, etc., legitimas uxores dedignetur habere, et hennientium equorum consuetudine vel rudentum asinorum more, etc., omnia turpiter foedet et confundat. — Epist. Ixi. And elsewhere more explicitly, he says, instar Sodomatorum. English legislators on divorce should have weighed such antecedents. 1 Macies illis pro sanitate, et judicii loco infirmitas est ; et dum satis putant vitio carere, in id ipsum incidunt vitium, quod virtutihus carent. . . . Hinc spes roboris . . Audeat luec setas plura et inventat. Facile CONCLUSION. 273 tiliau was a Celt, and only born in a nation where the guidquid Graceia mendax acdet in historia became a stolid proverb, re-applied in modern times. 1 ISTow Adamnan represented the infancy of the Irish intellect, in the like manner as her earlier historians did that of Greece, and as Geoffrey of Monmouth did that of the Welsh, and Archbishop Turpin that of the French. And yet the wilder absurdities of both the latter writers did but augur, as in Greece, instead of excluding, the ulterior advent, in the corresponding countries, of the Descartes, the Laplaces, the Cuviers, in the one ; and in the other, of such men as Pennant, Dalton, Davy, Owen ; the sole systematic writers, in their specialties, of English science. The introduction of the Latin could do nothing for Irish remediuru est ubertatis ; sterilia nullo labore vincuntur. — Quinct. Instit. Orat. lib. xi. 4. 1 The traits were well remarked by Caesar in the ancestors of the two races. While he describes the Gauls as much addicted to religion (admodum dediti religionibus), which was of course imagination, super- stition, " absurdity " ; he contrasts with them the Germans in having no Druids, nor any sort of priests whatever, nor even offering sacrifices. Deorura numero eos solos ducunt, quos cernunt et quorum opibds aperte juvantor. (De Bell. Gall. vi. 19). Here are men in whom the intelligence and even the imagination are bounded to the physical sphere of the mere senses ; who can revere but objects that obtrude themselves upon the eyes, the sun, the moon, and the agent of fire ; and even these but for the benefits which they produced them palpably — aperte, says the accu- rate writer, with emphasis. For which, besides, those benefactors received nor offering nor thanks. Thus the Teutons were already Protestants and political economists ; they held to the cheap salvation by faith, instead of " works." These, however, are the very qualities which are now heard so much of, as steadiness, practicality, business talent, nay, even genius ! 274 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. genius ; it did nothing even in countries where it spread beyond the monasteries. The great men of modern times, however some might use that tongue, have in reality, from Dante downwards, been all fostered by their mother dialects. It is only with the employment of the native idiom in the eighteenth century, that the Teutons themselves, in the whole compass of " Vaderland," are come to have a trace of literature, or a man of real genius. The translation of the Bible by Luther was to the Germans precisely what the Divine Comedy was long already to the Italians. But the mother tongue of Ireland is for centuries stricken dumb ; she has been left but the cross and clumsy tongue of a stepmother ; a language in its genius as opposed to her as the race — as is attested by the fact, that her French kinsmen produced nothing till they had recast through ages even the cultivated Latin into the clear, methodic, rational and compact order of their Celtic prototype. 1 1 It is hoped that few readers will fail to comprehend that the pre- sent little volume is hut a mere outpost, which rests upon a fortress of no narrow dimensions. The author, notwithstanding, is anxious even provisionally to remove the least appearance of the common crude assertion, and hence the quantity of notes which are allowed to disfigure it. The statement in the text requires the more some explanation, that the philologers thus far have left the point in utter darkness. It is known that the arrangement of the sentence in the French language — as, for instance, the collocation of the noun before the adjective— is different from even its mother Latin, as it is from English. De Brosse and Voltaire remarked successively the fact, and even gave a just enough account of the distinction. They agreed that while the common arrange- ment is " sensational," the French collocation is "rational," and they said natural: but this was wrong, for the other is quite as natural in the races using it. It is even more natural in the sense of being more primitive ; for the sensations, the qualities are first to be known CONCLUSION. 275 Besides, in ages when the clog of an alien tongue was common, the Irish did produce some men who were not only- greater, but more in number, — nor in the ratio of population, and named ; the substantive is a long later abstraction of the reason ; and it is only when the human intellect has reached organically this conception that the corresponding race is conducted, by mere instinct, to place the substrate foremost, whether noun or verb or sentence. But in the explanation of the fact those Frenchmen failed. They ascribed it, with a superficial national vanity, to higher civilization, not knowing that it was Celtic. And the universal silence on the subject since their day is a curious attestation of the infancy of the science of language. The Germans, however, whose analysis must lead the French, may have had other reasons than ignorance for the omission. As to English philologers, they perhaps never heard of it. In days which probably are past, when it was the English fashion to vilipend the language as most things else of Ireland, the stock of infor- mation and ingenuity must have been equal; for there was only to exhibit the arrangement of the Irish idiom, literally rendered in a page or two of English, to work conviction in any Englishmen who then retained a doubt, that the race who raved such jargon must be below the Hotten- tots. And yet it is the English construction itself that coincides with the Hottentot and every other savage language. The uncouthness of this order may be seen, in spite of habit, if we fancy Don Quixote pouring forth his famous eulogy, composed of adjectives beginning with the several letters of the alphabet, and Sancho blatantly awaiting to hear what it was all about — whether Eosinante, Dulcinea, Dapple, or, in short, anything. But if the Don, instead of English, spoke his mother tongue, the Celtic, he must have, on the contrary, begun with the subject heroine ; and having spread this canvas, he might proceed to tinting, not merely through an alphabet, but an eternity, without perplexing. So that, of all human idioms, the Celtic alone, and alike in its Irish rudeness and in its French refinement, conforms, in construction, to reason, logic, science ! It may be requisite to add a few authorities on this paradox. In law, where logical precision is enforced by care and conflict, even the English came, through Norman-French influence, to adopt the order ; as 276 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. Lut absolutely — than appeared in all the branches together of the English race. The greatness is of course with relation to the times. The conception of Virgilius respecting the anti- podes, was greater for the- eighth century than Bacon's organon for the sixteenth. Not, however, in the vulgar sense of the mere physical magnificence ; but as implying that amplitude of intellectual grasp, that yearning for com- pleteness or logical rotundity, in fine that organic sentiment, in the phrases " condition precedent, subsequent, etc.," malice prepense, aforethought, etc." It is also, the order of the only vernacular that has heen ever yet originated by philosophers, the artificial language for the deaf-mute. An English writer notes the fact as a strange singu- larity, and calls it an " inversion," his own tongue being of course standard. So unaware is he of its likeness to the Irish and the French, that it does not even occur to him to refer the anomaly to the fact, that it has heen the production of Frenchmen : it could, however, have heen normally constructed by no others, and accordingly all the German and British tentatives had failed. When Linnaeus, who though a Teuton was by his subject made synthetic, constructed a scientific language for botany, he gave it the arrangement, not of his own idiom, nor even of the Latin in which he wrote, but of the Irish ! The philosophic eminence of the French language is envied by every foreign writer who knows it. But this is all due to the Celtic collocation, which, moreover, it has not quite completely attained, having had to contend with the confusion of its Latin basis. The strife and measure of success, however, prove beyond all history the Gallic purity of the race, and the fatality of organization. And so this note, which commenced in explanation if not apology, ends with offering a new demonstration of the race of Reason. Still another, from the same source, is more convincing, if possible. It is that the Irish language has not only developed, like the class called European, the," verb substantive'' in full abstraction ; but has gone further, and in exception to doubtless all other idioms, possesses a verb rational, the pure copula of the logicians, and which the native grammarians style " assertative,'' or predicatory ! CONCLUSION. 277 named by the French ensemble : a term, like the thought, which is unknown in Teuton languages. Not even Plato nor Aristotle had really compassed Virgil's idea 1 ; nor, were it 1 At first, as by Homer, Thales, etc., the earth was thought a disc, surrounded and supported by the famous " ocean stream,'' in which it lay as if afloat. The school of Pythogaras gave sea and land a spherical form. Plato, here following it, explained that up and down have in themselves no real existence, but relate merely to the central body of the cosmos, which he supposed to be the earth. On this he adds, that if a man were to walk around it, he might attain a position antipodic to the actual. But this was not to say that there exist antipodes. So far otherwise, the proposition was a mere postulate or even image to aid him in illustrating a geometrical hypothesis, and he seems careful not to mention his central body as the earth at all. Aristotle, agreeing here (for once) with his master, proceeded to geograpliise this specu- lative sphere. The land he divided into Europe, Asia, Lybia, consider- ing the whole as still an " island," though not a disc. Its longitudinal extremities of India and the Pillars of Hercules, he deemed separated by an ocean continuous and not very wide — which he argued, with his usual scientific sagacity, from the resemblance of the elephants produced by the two regions : but in that ocean he imagined of course no antipodes. He speaks, it is true, of other continents, or an island resembling that described, as probably existing opposite. But here, too, the expression itself is avrnrSpB/xovs, which means no more than overagainst, as England is to France ; and besides, in fact, the ocean here referred to was the southern, where such a supposi- tion was far easier and even exigible. For the known elevation of the north pole of the earth had imparted the notion, that the obliquity of its axis was due to a preponderance of ocean to the south ; and since this is not so great (perhaps reasoned Aristotle) as to carry the depres- sion to more proximate verticality, it is probable that there exists in that direction a counter continent. And so natural was this impression, that down to the last century, it was a chief stimulus to exploration of these seas. This was also the cingulus anstralis of Cicero, and Mela's alter orbis a meridio. Moreover, Aristotle considered it as uninhabitable, through excess of heat ; and the known land or " island" was on all hands dis- 278 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. otherwise, could he have possibly derived it from their writings. Again, Scotus Erigena, a century later, conceived a system of philosophy bearing quite the same character, and tinguisbed by tbe name of tbe oixovfievrj or " only inhabitable". But were it otherwise, were the conjectural island supposed inhabited, the fact would not have still implied conception of antipodes. The notion was of people placed on opposite sides of a more or less hemispberal bill ; a phe- nomenon with which the senses had familiarised the fancy. It was the idea of antictlwnes in the same hemisphere, not of antipodes : and tbe two things are as wide apart in tbe progress of conception, as the correspond- ing latitude and longitude are in discovery. Tbe great geographer Strabo made the nest advance, and in a manner no less curiously consecutive than the preceding. Tbe same impression that led Aristotle to repeat his island on the south — conducted thitber by the variation of the meri- dian altitude— impelled Strabo to repeat both of them in the western ocean, and thus to be the first to plunge into the parallel abyss. Hence the "four quadrilaterals" that constitute his system, and by whose frame he was enabled to make the conjecture, tbat there may be other lands, and perhaps even inhabited, in the great ocean between Iberia and India. But, as if imagination was scared back from the precipice, he only adds that such people would be wholly different from us, and, consequently, would not appertain to his subject ! The Celtic Seneca attained a notion less unfirm, though poetic. But as soon as the Greeks retired, the pure and merely sensile Romans fell quite naturally back to almost the disc of Thales. See Tacitus's explanation of the " short nights" of North Britain, (Agric. xii). And the Fathers of tbe Church, in assailing the Greek philosophers, made tbe idea of antipodes a principal butt ; as Lactantius represents it, the existence of men " with their feet above their head." But it was charged, be it remarked, not as a tenet of those philosophers, but as reducing to absurdity their doctrine of the earth's sphericity ! It was in this state of things, and from the midnight of the middle ages, that an Irish ecclesiastic, who attained the rank of bishop, first proclaimed to the world, and maintained against the Church, the existence precise, positive, and natural, of antipodes. The vast difficulty thus sur- mounted of conceiving fellow men, and by consequence himself, as placed CONCLUSION. 279 based on a methodical Division of Nature, which never entered an ancient intellect, and which no modern has yet- appreciated. It is true the execution is scarce beyond the like flies against a ceiling — a conception which not one in an hundred of even the educated, perhaps scarcely the astronomers, can to this day realize — this immense stride could be, in such an age, no result of science. It was a case of that predominance of reason over the senses, of the faculty of the relational over those of the physico-personal, which now remains established as a character of the race, and which was seen in the pre- ceding note to give its mould to the very language. Yet Alexander Humboldt, who in his history of geography gives a confused though meagre sketch of the foregoing progression, does not deign to make allusion to the name of Virgilius. As great men, how- ever, Pascal and Kepler, owned his titles. The German savant, it is true, has also omitted Plato, though the author of the philosophical foundation of the whole structure. But to compensate, he does not omit Albertus Magnus, but parades him for repeating three centuries later the doctrine of the Irishman, and with a Gothic variation. The Great Albert imagined that the carries hum-anas (id est, of the antipodes) " must be fastened to the earth by some magnetic influence, as the load- stone suspends iron" ! Here is curious comment on the intellects of the two races ! Nor is this all. The same venerable mediocrity, in his book called the " Cosmos" (but which is rather a Cunctus), has the following obser- vation : " And if in the dark period of the middle ages, Christian fanaticism and the lingering influence of the Ptolemaic school revived a belief in the immobility of the earth, and the globe again assumed the form of the disc of Thales, it must not he forgotten that a German cardinal, Nicholas de Cus, was the first who had the courage and inde- pendence of mind to ascribe to our planet, almost a century before Copernicus, both rotation on its axis and revolution in space,'' (vol. ii. 469). Here, then, is a man whom we must take care to honour for knowing what was known several centuries before our era, and for having the "independence of mind" to repeat it, being a cardinal, although with the most natural impunity ; while, on the other hand, our monitor himself forgets a man who, in a period still darker, did not 280 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. age. But in the idea (which marks the race), he transcended Aristotle, instead of but transposing him, like Albert, thence styled Great, or of traducing him, like certain other kindred celebrities. 1 Finally, the writers who first propounded in repeat but transcend others, and who not merely had the "courage" as well as calibre of mind to do so, but moreover to maintain it in the face of the Church, of which he too was at the time an episcopal dignitary ; and more than all, to endure degradation from that dignity, and excom- munication, without retracting his convictions ! But the one was a Teuton, and so has trumpeters to celebrate him. The other was a Celt, and especially an Irish one — whose countrymen as yet have neither spirit nor head to vindicate him. 1 Tbus Friar Bacon writes : "If I bad power over the works of Aristotle, I would have them all lurried; for it is but a loss of time to study them, and a cause of error and a multiplication of ignorance beyond expression? (Opus Mag.) Yet it were easy to prove that any- thing of serious consequence, advanced by the Friar, had been filched from those works ; its air of novelty was merely due to either grotesque misconception, or the minute fragmentation which forms the mission of the race. Moreover, for the damage done the world by Aristotle, the Friar's two sovereign recipes are these: "1. The study of the Bible, as the fountain of all truth ; 2 . The employment to that end of mathe- matics and experiments" ! Aristotle had, in terms that have never since been equalled, defined science to be a knowledge of the necessary and the universal. Francis Bacon can perceive no better reason for his doing so, than that he was rather a logical caviller than a competent theologian: — potius ut amator logicae, quam theologiam amplectans. At the present day, to all men with a tincture of real science, the mere statement of two such positions must be tantamount to volumes, in exposing the proper character of those two lights of English intellect. The conclusion would fairly be that they were mere crack-brained zealots, who rank in science with their kinsmen John Bunyan and Jacob Bcehmen ; or at best, witb brother Swedenborg, who has been in reality a greater mathematician and even discoverer than either. Or if not so, CONCLUSION. 281 English literature that religious Rationalism which has been, after them, so noised in Germany, namely, Toland and Col- lins, were both Irishmen or Celts ; and were combatted by that they were the ignorant and impudent ranters which De Maistre went so far to substantiate against the Chancellor. But such a conclu- sion would be as unjust to them as they were to Aristotle, and for the same reason. This reason is suggested in these pages for the first time. It is that neither of the Bacons understood Aristotle, nor could possibly have reached the point of view of his philosophy — their own, as that of their whole race, being fundamentally opposite. It was only the Celtic, or the race of synthesis, that could continue the Greek philosopher in the succeeding cycle. This is also an assertion requiring illustration, which may at once be given and received by the case of Virgil. The denouncer of this teacher of the doctrine of antipodes was, without any casualty, a Teuton, an English Teuton. It was the Boniface aforesaid, the legate of Germany. The charge was that the doctrine must imply another world, another sort of men under the earth, another sun, another moon, and no doubt another heaven. Quasi Vir- r/ilium, alium -mundum, alios sub terra homines, aliurn denique solem atque lunam assereret. There is an example, on a palpable scale, of the Teutonic dualism which must be now familiar ! The report proceeds to say that Boniface, " deeming this doctrine impious and repugnant to divine philosophy, worried Virgil, both officially and privately, to retract these fooleries (namias), and enjoined him, in virtue of his legateship, not to pollute (polluat) and contaminate the pure and simple wisdom of Christ with such insanities (deliramentis).'' Thus the language and the logic of the legate, against the heresy, were not less gentilitial than his mode of understanding it. Virgil, indignant at the gross and grotesque charge, complained to his friend and patron. This patron was no less characteristic than the persecutor. It was Utilon, Duke of Bavaria, or as styled by the Pope's rescript, regulus Boiorum. Thus as blood is not water, the ruler of the Celtic Boii was the natural and sympathetic protector of the Celtic Irishman. This kinship it is that also explains the well-known fact of the large numbers of Irish and Scotch who during the middle ages are found in southern Germany, and who rose there to position in the church n2 282 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. Newton, by Clerk, and by Leibnitz, who were three of the first intellects of the Teutonic race. In religion too the Irish showed the like originality. If and the universities. Ratisbon was more an Irish capital than Dublin. Hence also it is that the Bavarians remained so much Catholic ; that their capital is the centre of the fine arts in Germany ; that their country has been always made a base of operations against the Germanic empire by the invading French, as under Richelieu, Louis XIV., and finally Napoleon, when, as is known, the Bavarians reclaimed openly their Celtic parentage. Despite this protection of Utilon to Virgilius, Pope Zachary com- missioned his Teutonic agent to suspend the "philosopher" from his clerical functions, and ordered the Duke to send him on for trial to Rome : — Virgilium philosophum (si sacerdos sit, nescio, says his Holi- ness) ab templo Dei et ecclesid depellito, etc., si ilium perversam doctrinam fuerat confessus. The issue is unfortunately not given in these Annals of the Boii by Aventinus. But Kepler, a Catholic, and of the same country, relates that Virgilius was condemned : Fuit quidem Virgilius episcopus Saliburgensis, ab officio dejectus, quod antipodes esse esset ausus asserere,—an expression that implies he deemed the doctrine original ; and Kepler is on such a point, moreover backed by Pascal, almost as good authority as Alexander Humboldt. Scotus Erigena, from the like impulse of organization, and knowing as little of Aristotle as Virgilius could have known, advanced the same sphericity of view to nature generally. Another Scot was the first to bring the philosophic writings of the Greek master, by translation from the Arabic, to the west. And so on downwards, the Celtic race have been the main-stay of this prince of reasoners, against the extreme races of rhapsody and of routine. It may be added that Michael Scot, for the services thus rendered, is treated by Friar Bacon in the style of Boniface to Virgil ; being, he says, an ignoramus at once in words and things — ignarus et verborum et rerum ; and as Francis Bacon, too, did the demonstrations of Copernicus, which, to the author of the Novum Organum, were but " fictions," abstractions. ' Both the Bacons have, however, it need not be repeated, their really sterling merits, if only viewed aright. Nay, their too modest country- men do not do them complete justice. Thus, among the revelations so CONCLUSION. 283 they had perhaps no chronicler, no Bede of the Irish Church, they had at least the church itself in the national and Celtic form ; as the Scots had the " Culdee," and the French have the " Gallican" Bede could chronicle but the story of the Church of Eome in England. And so curiously true is this, that the independent Irish Church was put down finally, at the direction of the Papacy, by the same English who now incessantly reproach the Irish for adhering to that imposi- tion ! It may, however, be admitted, in extenuation of their Papal fealty, that in the English this was powerfully seconded already, by that peculiar grace of their own internal religion, which has, in the alternate modes of merchandise and much vaiinted of the Friar, what English reader has been minded of the greatest of his discoveries ; that which he himself thought worthy of being communicated to the Holy See, whose power be invoked to put it forthwith into practice. This was a method of universal grammar, by means of which ail Christendom, from crowned heads to chamber-maids, would be made capable of reading and understanding the Bible in the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin, and the Syriac, and this in the space of a few days. And so real and important was this higb pressure organum that it had been foretold, he said, by rmmerousprojjhecies—frequentibus vaticiniis confirrnaturn (Lipsius, Act. Erud.). Now, is there anything in Adamnan to surpass this ? But, moreover, with the Celt the "absurdities'' were wrought by God — a premiss of omnipotence which covered logically all pretensions. With the Teuton the miracle was wrought by his own tumescence. The comparison is recommended to the countryman of St. Ad;imnan; for Roger Bacon is a specimen far more vaunted than the humble Bede of the Anglo-Saxon genius and steadiness in question ; tbatis to say, the spirit of prophecy and pragmatism, of numeration and nominalism, which are the essence of the race. So much so, that this great nominalist "absurdity" of the Friar is alluded to, though cautiously or covertly, by the Chancellor; who repeats him indeed, throughout, scarce more in name than in philosophy ; as both repeat at bottom Aristotle whom they vilify. 284 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. marauding, performed the chief part in all their missionary labours. But with this passage of Ireland into the hands of the Philistines, the promise of Virgilius and Erigena was nipped. Her genius, when it was not stripped or starved in the body, was stifled by the inquisition of English prejudice and publication ; for to the latter there was no access but for those dregs of her talent, who are not above descending them- selves to buffoonery, and travestying her miseries, for the "Snob" literature of London. The only outlet thus permitted to her poverty and provincialism, was likewise left but as conducing to a similar debasement. It was oratory, in which she has the rabble honour of excelling, and in the spiritual order, sectarian contention. Both these modes of mental action (if they can be well called mental) would be in their useful places in a race of muscularity ; for here the feeble and the isolated sparkles of all truth are to be gained but by a half-mechanical confriction of masses. In a race which is organically cpiite the opposite of this — a race of speculation, order, method, organization ; to such a race the oratory and its kindred institutions must be a present as insidious as the fabled shirt of Nessus. 1 They dissipate an intellect whose genius lies in system ; they evaporate a will to which compression alone gives force ; they divide by fac- tious quarrellings a race whose life is in its union ; they debase, by the temptations to political deception, a people in 1 Non de ociosa et quieta re loquimur, et qiiae probitate et modestia gaudeat ; sed est magna et notabilis eloquentia, alumna licentiae quam stulti libertatem vocdbant, comes seditionum, effrenati populi incitamen- tum, sine obsequio, sine severitate, contumax, timeraria, arrogans, quae in bene constitutes civitatibus non oritur. Tacitus, Dial. De Oratoribus. CONCLUSION. 285 ■whom character and morals depend on honour ; they thus distract and degrade the nation into a helpless and headless multitude, that can but roll from side to side, in a feverish and fitful stupor, between the appearance of besotted bigotry, and of insane insubordination. It is in this way that the English remain still the real supporters of that bugbear of "Eomanism" -which they re- established in Ireland. Its true agents are not the poor and the patriotic priests ; but the plethoric church establishment, that keeps the strain by counter pressure. Nor in this, any more than in the other institutions, were it just to charge or credit them with Machiavellian policy ; they only think, with honest ignorance intensified by selfishness, that what so snugly suits themselves cannot but be the best for others. But in despite of all this, there still survives a single fact which should say more for Irish mind than could a score of men of genius. It is a circumstance notorious in England as in Ireland, that the preachers she sends over from time to time to " convert the Eapist," can (though some of them perhaps be "senior wranglers" of her universities) not be persuaded to this day, that the peasantry of the "Green Isle" are not all trained by the priests in the black art of Aristotle ; so subtly do they baffle the appliance of the Word. So, in Scotland, there are hundreds of coblers and weavers who could nonplus a consistory of Anglican Doctors, on the themes of "fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute." This amounts to a demonstration of the race of rationality. The contrast is confirmed by the structure of the religions. The Catholic and Calvinist appeal to argument, assign premises ; 286 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. the Protestant effectually renounces all argument. To the Teuton his "conscience" or even "private judgment" is major, minor, middle, all or either as may suit him. This may seem to he a paradox, from quite the opposite preten- sions ; hut every tyro in logic may discern its exactness. It must he needless to remark that no reflection or even preference is here intended respecting either of them as religions. These pages have to do with them alone as mental processes, not as principles of truth or as media of salvation. In fine, another section of the same Celtic race, decried as no less "pure" and still more primitive than the Irish, present the same distinction, and here in form of men of genius, hecause beneath a fostering government and a congenial polity. The western provinces of France hold, in her literature and science, the same supremacy that she accords the Breton regiments in her heroic army. And this from the earliest dawn of French thought to the present day ; from Abelard, through Montaigne, Descartes, Pezron, Montesquieu, Broussais, Chateaubriand, down to De Lamennais. So in eloquence, this spontaneous and rudest product of the race, the Bretons started forth, like Pallas, in the glorious band of the Girondins. An Irishman acquainted with all these facts and influences, obstructive and triumphant, should have made them some allowance. That the patriotic writer of the letter in question should have failed to find his countrymen or their race even " clever," is a crowning illustration of how English domination has been stamped into the brain as well as to the breast of Ireland. Indeed the Irish, despite their vapouring, look on England as the first of nations. While CONCLUSION. 287 the Scotch have always kept a shrewd and elevated eye on France, the French people have heen utterly tabooed to the Irish ; for here the policy of England and of Borne for once concurred. 1 The Irish have, in consequence, been shaped to accept London, from the playbills of its neAvspapers, as the Mecca of civilization ; and it is scarce too much to say, that they look out on the Continent as if through that meet sample of London art, the Thames Tunnel. t 3. But were things otherwise, and that the Irish and the Celtic race in general remained without producing great thinkers to this day, the fact would in reality not compromise the theory. Why, for instance, have the Greeks, with a classic language native to them, yielded, through the period since the Irish are known to history, not one example of real genius or even tolerable cleverness 1 Why had the Teutons themselves, for the immemorial ages since their supposed progeniture by Hertha and Mannus, down to very modern times, produced but savages or soldiers 1 For no other general reason than that the special functions, assigned by nature in the progress of society to the two races, had in the 1 This tacit concert would appear to be particularly close at present. The priests should beware of what they do in that direction. Woe to their influence, if not their office also, should either be discovered by the body of the Irish people to be leagued, even accidentally, against their nationality ! They would soon teach them to distinguish whether centuries of suffe7iug have been a fidelity to Home or to Race. The French people of 1788 were as pious or as "priest-ridden'' as the Irish appear still to be ; what were they one or two years after ? But the Irish, their clergy may rest well assured, are brothers of the French in this as in worse things. 288 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. former been completed, and in the latter not yet commenced. But as the Teutons, with their faculties, could not have left the woods until the vast Eoman empire had succeeded to the Greek, and by its plunder tempted them into involun- tary polish, as the Tartars of upland Asia were always drawn in by the south ; so the Celtic part of order or reconstruction could come in play but in accordance as the Gothic dissolution was accomplished. Thus it happens that the Celts, while their main faculty is yet scarce occupied, are judged comparatively with the Teutons in the flush of their meridian. For, to say truth, the Irish never yet had a civilization, in any proper sense of the term. It is their best hope and assurance for the future, as was remarked by the judicious and liberal Camden. But, on the other hand, it is as true, that no portion of such a race could have ever been savag or even savagely barbarian ; their mere physical organization pitched their instincts above this. If the Irish became savage, it was from contact with savages, and in retaliation and self-defence. They are known to have been previously gentle and generous — the two qualities that best distinguish the civilized from the savage state. It is in fact this contrast of their moral and mental nature with the rudeness or simplicity of their material culture, that has always made this race a sort of problem in history. It was not reasoned that the one phenomenon was a consequence of the other, no less in the collective than the individual body. The man of mind is not the man of fashion ; the man of thought is not the man of thrift. A community of philosophers would soon relapse into the savage state, or into what would be so CONCLUSION. 289 termed by political economists. But they would have their special intellectual compensation, as the Celtic race accord- ingly had everywhere, in due proportion. The grand Druidic hierarchy and its twenty years of study and its doctrine of the. immortality of the soul (which meant Society), seen in contrast with the rude armour and the wattled huts of the ancient Gauls, came, in this way, to astonish the well-disciplined and civilized Romans — whose own grave Senate could, how- ever, determine the weightiest business by the entrails of a dying calf or the pecking of a hungry chicken. Their poets also composed epigrams upon those strange people who, brought to Eome barbarians and "slaves" by Cassar, sprang forthwith to the head of Eoman eloquence and the bar, and even " in the Senate put off the breeches and on the lati-clave." So Alexander, before them, wondered, when on invading the lower Danube, he asked an embassy, presented him from the neighbouring Celts, what it was that they most feared in the world ; expecting doubtless that these barbarians must have answered reverentially, that it was the new master of that world. The cool response, however, was : that they " feared nothing at all, unless it was that the shy should fall ;" but added, to shew Mm that they divined his aim, that they "respected Alexander, and proffered him their friendship" ! An example of what has later been known as "Irish impudence," which would have furnished to Longinus a better specimen of the Sublime than the verbal fiat lux, et lux facta est of the Bible. Again, Lucian, in his curious description of Ogmius, the Hercules, as he styles him, of his Gallo-Grecian neighbours — and from whom the Celtic alpha- bet of the Irish is named Ogam, their literal one of sixteen 290 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. characters being the Punic or Pelasgic— Lucian also was astonished that while all nations, even the Greeks, made this divinity a being of strength and muscle, not of mind, the Celts imagined him, on the contrary, as a venerable grey- haired man, with a congeries of tubes of ivory passing off from his tongue and terminating in the ears of a multitude of people, listening round him and led captive by his eloquence and wisdom. And well may he wonder, for nothing of the kind had ever elsewhere entered the primitive fancy of a people. This inappreciable record would of itself alone — could there have then been social philosophy to comprehend it — have served to indicate the supreme race of civilization and of intellect. In fine, the Irish who brought with them, through a less obstructed route, the temper and traditions of this race in higher purity, present, in turn, the anomaly of their Bards, Historians, Sages, organically constituted and endowed by the State ; the " shoals of philosophers" (as they alone were then styled), whom they poured upon the Continent in the darkest of the Dark ages ; the semi- naries of all learning which they entertained at home : and when these things are confronted with the really primitive rudeness of this people at the time in the industrial arts of life, the same enigma arises, in an aggravated measure. Thus the natives are encouraged to console their humiliation by clinging to the glories of a lost civilization ; and their- adversaries, on the other hand, emboldened to deny to them, or at least to disparage, what they did possess undoubtedly. It will be henceforth comprehended that there really is no dilemma ; that those phases of Irish history are both compatible, nay consequent ; that the industrial and the CONCLUSION. 291 mental appertain, in social progress, to races not merely different, "but opposite in end and aptitude. Thus, a race of Personality, whose aims are property and self-protection, will devise castles and coats-of-mail to case the person and keep the plunder, and will thus cultivate the arts of warfare, metallurgy, architecture : while a race of which the impulses are generous and social, will live in common or in clans, and go to hattle in their hare skin, to shew how utterly the indi- vidual is forgotten in the common interest. The Celts might answer, when they are taunted with having had no splendid dwellings, as their kinsman Anacharsis did the Greeks on a like occasion — that the objection took the shell, and not the tortoise, to he the animal ; attached more value to magni- ficence in the house than in the master. It is also clear the personal or the crustacean race must, in the social as the animal series, precede the naked and more noble ; it spreads the frame on which the latter after weaves the finer tissues. This frame the Teutons laid, accordingly, in what is called the Feudal system, and in their subsequent commercialism, which is a marine Feudalism. They in this way detached the Celts from the Roman despotism, to whose family agglomeration their social instincts might yield indefinitely, 1 and dispersed 1 The " clan " resembled the family in being a union, but in little else ; it was the family socialized or set upon an opposite basis — the principle of voluntary aggregation in the members ; not the physical and necessary one of procreation. Even Scotch writers, who must be deemed to have had no sinister motives, have habitually confounded these opposite conditions, in spealdng of their countrymen of the Highlands as "patriarchal'' — thus suggesting an analogy with the Jews of the days of Abraham. Since they did not deign to study — perhaps could not — the philosophy of this peculiarly Celtic organization in the life before 292 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. them, by their colonies and confiscations, throughout the earth, where they would never go of themselves, and will he needed in other times. Meanwhile, the Celts, it is thus evident, could have done nothing to compare fairly with a race which overrode them in the triumph of its day and mission, and whose proper mediseval and mercantile civiliza- tion also lingers still predominant 1 and gives the law to vulgar judgment. them, they should have learned it from one who was both capable and careful to transmit it to posterity in these few admirable lines : — In Gallia, non solum in omnibus civitatibus, atque in omnibus pagis partibusque, sed pene etiam in singulis domibus, factiones sunt: earumque factionum sunt principes, qui summam auctoritatem eorum judicio habere existiman- tur ; quorum ad arbitrium judiciumque summa omnium rerum consilio- rvmque redeat. Idque ejus rei causa antiquitus institutum videtur, NE QUIS EX PLEBE CONTRA POTENTIOEEM AUXILII EGEEET : SUOS enim opprimi quisque, et circumveniri non patitur ; neque, aliter si faciat, ullam inter suos habeat auctoritatem. (Csesar. De Bell. Gall. vi. xi.) This exquisitely profound anatomy of the clan (for Caesar's civitates are the clans of the Gauls) is scarce, it is perceived, like a family or patriarchy, which is not notable for having "factions'' against its authority. It is the tendency, exhibited already in the shell, of the race of true and temperate, that is, intellectual, liberty (in distinction from the muscular, which is the instinct of beasts of prey) towards that social organization of which the Gauls are now the paragon. 1 Mr. Mill, in his late publication on " Liberty," complains of the decline of those strong individualities of intellect and adventure which have raised England to greatness, and ascribes it to compression by public opinion. Mr. Mill should be philosopher enough to divine deeper. He should know that a race of military and even mercantile energy are liable to a species of mental marasmus, in proportion as society becomes refined and regular, surrendering to mind the predominance over muscle. Thus the same Anglo-Saxons, when first civilized, became forthwith so inert as to let themselves be conquered, and even enslaved, repeatedly by bands of Danes or Normans. Several of their kinglets changed the CONCLUSION. 293 But what, moreover, with this advantage, is the positive reality beneath the reputation of Teutonic or English genius 1 For there certainly is error, confusion, exaggeration ; and the truth must be of account to even the English themselves : in sober sooth, they need it most, as all patients do the physi- cian. There is first, then, a confusion of what is Teuton and what is not. The English community is peculiarly con- ditioned. The close connection with the Celts at once of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, has sprinkled it for centuries with families or individuals, who would usually be of the energetic or intellectual, advancing from provincial secpiestra- tion towards the capital. These must often, before merging in the mass of the English people, have gone for much in the production of the national fund of mind. The disposition of the Celts to veil, as not 3d, their antecedents, and often mystify the very name in the event of attaining position, concurred crown for the cowl. The German people, who were so far-famed for their " liberty'' in the primitive forests, are now vegetating tame as cattle beneath their thirty despotisms. So the Turks have likewise lost their " great individualities," and are going fast to lose themselves, since they have been reduced to peace. Peace and order have an opposite effect on the mental races ; it is their season of exercise and energy, as of ascen- dancy. They come, through science, to overpower on their own ground the very warriors, whose natural elements of dominance were strength. endurance, and brutality. Amid the multitude of writings provoked by Oherbourg, there was one observation of sense and sagacity. An English officer remarked that English sailors, man for man, could beat the French on one condition, — that of having rough weather; otherwise, not. The opinion was professionally and philosophically creditable, and will be found verified if ever put to trial. So that even as to war, the French Emperor is right ; " whatever advances civilization elevates France." A position of wider truth than he doubtless comprehended. 294 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. with the as-well known disposition of the English to claim whatever obtained currency and credit as Anglo-Saxon. 1 But in addition to these waifs of the domestic computation, the 1 The author is aware that no cogency of argument and no notoriety of the truth of general statements, will silence a reluctance upon points of this nature, unless the mouth he stopped hy a positive example. But this precaution, for which he has but too abundant means, would in practice swell the notes beyond the volume of the text. He can there- fore but engage that all rational objections would receive a due attention on some future occasion. Meanwhile, as the present is a charge of special weight, it appears urgent to support it by a reference of that description. And to render it ineludably comprehensive and conclusive, the example will be taken from our own enlightened day, which of course will respond d fortiori for the past, and from an authorship collectively expressive of the nation, nay compounded, constitutionally, of King, Lords, and Com- mons — to wit, TJie Boyal Society of Literature of Great Britain. The publication in question, lately issued in two volumes, is entitled : Biographia Britannica Literaria, and proposes to treat of the men of note in letters produced by both islands throughout the middle ages. It begins with an introduction of over a hundred pages, in which, however, not a single Welsh, Scotch, or Irish name, or even these national names themselves, are so much as once mentioned. Thus the porch to this temple of intellectual concord is occupied expressly and alone by " Anglo- Saxons." Then, it is set off into compartments such as these : "Period of Anglo-Saxon literature'' — "Anglo-Saxon science" — "Higher branches of science " — " Physical sciences " — " Philosophy," etc. And all this, be it noted, in the seventh or eighth century. But how, it will be asked, have these things been exemplified? The literature, for instance, is embodied in Beowulf, whose infantile versicles — described so well by Sharon Turner with all the other native poetry as a "mere succession of exclamations" — we are to take for "the Anglo-Saxon Iliad and Odyssey." Then, in point of language, "the West Saxon was the Attic dialect." And in short, " England possessed a number of scholars w 7 ho would have been the just pride of the most enlightened age." Unfortunately, however, the Society cannot conceal, that when the nation was a century farther from the woods, the Great Alfred could not CONCLUSION. 295 home productions of those dependencies, in science, arts, letters, are taken wholesale by foreign writers as achievements of English genius. And it is known that, if abstracted, they woidd leave it largely breached. find within the compass of the same England a single person to instruct him in the rudiments of Latin grammar. He even adds that the very clergy could not read matins in that language. So, this monarch, as he learned even his own Saxon alphabet, and at the age of twelve, but from his Gallic step-mother, had to send for three Celts to initiate him in Latin, a Frenchman, a "Welshman, and an Irishman. The Society do not think it necessary to allude to these nationalities, nor indeed to touch at all upon this pedagogic process ; the object of the invitation was that "patronage'' of intellect which it appears the nation had already com- menced. They are equally silent, it is needless to add, on the Celtic supervision of Alfred's translations, although they indiscreetly cite the pupil's own avowal, that the originals were put for him " into plainer words.'' However, these translations of the two little works of Bcethius and Orosius restored with increased lustre the glories of the previous age ; and if you doubt the Society, only read the portly volume through which honest Sharon Turner emblazons it, in his History. Qui non odit Bocvium, amet tua carmina, Moivi. Finally came the Normans and " introduced the [already] Anglo-Norman language, a neo-Latin dialect, which was the vernacular tongue of the invaders." Here is, to be sure, a rather cross-grained genesis. But the reader will feel indulgent, if he try to do better, on the normal condition of keeping silent on the Celtic French. Thus the Anglo-Saxons with their " sciences'' and their geniuses occupy exclusively the foreground or Introduction, It is effectually the same in the body of the work. The very first sentence may be taken as a sample : — " The catalogue of Anglo- Saxon writers begins with a name of very doubtful authenticity, which is supposed to have been borne by one of that people whom the Anglo-Saxons had driven from their homes." The writer referred to is Gildas ; and he passes, it is seen, from the Welsh to the Saxons with much the like sans facon as the island did itself. The " Anglo-Saxon catalogue '' continues with two Irishmen, namely, Columbanus and Adamnan. Then comes Nennius, a Welsh- 296 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. There is something still more grave within the area of proper England. The north and west districts are predomi- nantly Celtic, and they have produced seven-eights of the man, who dealt the Saxons some hard blows, but who no less, it seems, or rather all the more, is a mere myth, as are also half a dozen other Cambrian celebrities. Per contra, who would think it ? King Arthur, the Kound Table, and even the prophecies of Merlin, are all real and perhaps Saxon. The Scotch division does not seem to have been thought worth even filching from it. Michael Scot, the wizard him- self, is wholly absent. Nay Duns too, the Doctor suotillissimus, with his twelve folios, transcending in even mass the entire Anglo-Saxon literature. Foreign countries, France and Italy, are laid more freely under tribute, much indeed as other " property " was " gathered " from them in the middle ages. And in short, to speak seriously, excepting Bede and Alcuin, there are not half a dozen really Anglo-Saxon names in this magnificent list of some three hundred authors, that have been ever heard of outside the antiquaries, or at most the island. By way of foil to this strange multitude, and to exhibit the propor- tion which the Saxons have always held as well in mind as in muscle, Ireland is, like Wales, allowed to furnish to the British gallery a few names, such as Columbanus, Adamnan, and Scotus-Erigena. Dicuil is smuggled into some " Anglo-Saxon monks " ; but as he states expressly himself that he was an Irishman, he is allowed to have been "born in Ireland.'' But the Society sagaciously remark it as " curious" that the learned Letronne should have believed that he wrote there. A treatise De Mensura Orhis Terrce to be written in a petty island, and this island Ireland, and in the ninth century ! The thing, it is plain, was trebly incongruous, and so he must have written and learned in France ; and so the Frenchman stands corrected in both lore and patriotism. It is true, this famous antiquary foresaw the objection, and replied to it by shewing that Ireland had been, at that j^eriod, the fountain of learning to Europe, France included ; and he states in particular, that whatsoever knowledge Alcuin himself took to France, he owed entirely to the Irish. But this part of the French commentator of Dicuil no doubt the Society neglected to read. So, Adamnan too was only "born in Ireland": for this, be it remarked, is nicely different from being an Irishman, as one need not CONCLUSION. 297 mind of the nation. The fact of the production (saving errors of account) can, at all events, not be denied ; and then the burthen would remain with the party objecting to explain be a horse for being born in a stable ; clever Englishmen are born in Ireland — "the Duke,'' for instance. Moreover, even the Irish birth of AJamnan is but "supposed,'' and "the date of it is not known." Ergo, he was probably Anglo-Saxon. With the Society, indeed, everything that tends to favour Ireland is merely "said'' or "supposed" to be ; while all things the other way are without perad venture. Thus the country itself in the age of Columbanus "is said to have been free from the savage barbarism which desolated most [England being the exception] of the other countries of the west, and by which it (Ireland) has been too frequently visited in later times.'' Even this hypothetical concession is soon qualified — " The accounts of the peaceful disposition of the native Irish [in anticipative distinction from the peaceful Saxon Irish] may possibly be exaggerated." Thus the authors affect to canvass if the Irish were yet tame, a point dispens- ing of course from touching their state of intellect and culture. Indeed the Irish with all their pretensions on these heads — pretensions allowed largely by Continental writers — are dismissed by our British literary biographers as follows : — " Contemporary writers describe the Irish of the sixth and seventh centuries as a simple and harmless people, superstitious and enthusiastic, etc. ; and their shores afforded a frequent refuge to those who sought to pass their days in contemplative solitude.'' The Society no doubt had overlooked in even Bede the following among other intimations to the same purport : " There were at that time in Ireland a multitude of the English, as well nobles as common, who made it their abode, having left their own island for the sake of study or of leading a more continent life. Some of them seriously joined the monasteries ; others preferred going about to the cells of the professors and giving themselves up to reading. But all of them the Irish cheer- fully received, and supplied gratis with food, with boolcs, and with instruction." (Lib. iii. 27). Also the lines of Fulgentius : Exem-plo patrum, commotus amore legendi, Ivit ad Hibernos, sophia mirabile claros. 298 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. otherwise a singularity so compromising to the purer Saxons. It need, however, not he left upon this negative defence. The history of the early Saxon kingdoms of those districts speaks of Britons as remaining a potent part of the popula- tion. Says Bede : "Edwin, King of the Northumbrians, ruled all the populations of Britain [meaning England, to the exclusion of Wales] as well English as British." And Edgar, in apportioning laws to his subjects, specifies the latter as Angles, Danes, and Britons: Spence, a recent writer, thinks the " reflux " was large. Of this, in fact, there are deeper proofs than meagre mediaeval chronicles ; proofs deriving meaning from the doctrines of this volume. It is now conceived, for instance, why, in the line of politics, the north-west has always adhered to the Stuarts, down to even receiving the forlorn hope of the Pretender ; why, in religion, it was the longest to resist the Reformation, and finally adopted the Preshyterian form, and is to-day the centre of the Catholics of England ; why, in the useful arts, it is the region of manufactures — for manufacture is the industry appropriate to the Celts, as commerce to the Teutons, and The authors too do not seem to know that their hero Alcuin, the first Alfred, and others, were taught in Ireland or by Irishmen ; still less, in fine, that Ireland gave the English the very alphabet — which, however,' (by a pointed illustration of the text) the English christened " Anglo- Saxon," and claimed that they gave the Irish. They, however, perhaps never held that they gave the Irish the Green Isle. But doubtless the presumptious exaggerations of the Irish revolted the scientific rigour of the Society ; whose own modesty, conscientious- ness, and common sense, as slightly sketched, must henceforth be a model in international adjudications. They will at all events afford a sample of the mode of manufacture of Anglo-Saxon genius and pre- eminence in general. CONCLUSION. 299 agriculture to the Romans ; why, in the fine arts also (which cannot be pretended, any more indeed than most of the coarser manufactures, to depend upon the geological distri- bution of coal heels) Manchester has made them the objects of its exhibition, and is, or will be, their national capital much rather than London ; above all, it is seen why the so-called Manchester party has been the champion of the towns against the Corn-law feudalism, and may be still (if all domestic means be not inadequate) the rescuer of the English people from the most awful crash in history. Such is, too, the explanation of the fact which a Welsh barrister used to insinuate, with truly Celtic esprit, by saying : that, in England, the farther one moved to the West, the more the wise men were found to come from the East. And how well the mot succeeded in disguising its satire, is attested by the fact that Lord Chancellor Eldon — the ex officio wisest individual of the nation — records it, in his jest-book, with as true English hprit, as follows : " Serjeant Davies used to say, that it was very true that the wise men of England came mostly from the East" ! The pious chancellor took the Biblical allusion for the marrow. Besides this fortunate confusion towards augmenting " Saxon genius," there is national exaggeration of both the real and suppositious. The English are men of business in this as all the rest. It is not wholly, as may seem, the usual spirit of bravado. It even is not also that patriotic selfishness which was observed in Shylock to blend the nation with his private interests. There is a clear commercial policy in keep- ing up celebrities that are a stock-in-trade, no less than coal- pits and cotton fabrics. How should men of common tact 300 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. admit these staples excelled by foreigners 1 How, therefore, should a foreign poet he allowed to approach Shakespeare, who year after year is found to sell by large editions 1 So with even the Bible, which is still more productive. Perhaps millions of the race are at this moment, in both hemispheres, deriving a subsistence from printing and publishing, to say nothing of the preaching, of this venerated volume. Would you have them conceive people who do not read or at least buy it as other than besotted, or abandoned by heaven 1 Indeed there is no better proof of the justice of the taunt which the English make the Irish, of lacking " business talent " than the fact that the latter are no Bible-reading people — especially with the example of England before them. Nor need this solid under-motive detract from the spiritual ; on the contrary, it gives it body, object, earnestness, and unction. However, from this eye, or at least instinct, to business, reinforced by the other gentilitial traits referred to, there is no country in the world where a marketable name may be surer of being magnified and maintained than in England. And foreigners appreciate the wool by the cry, in the absence of all principles of judgment in such subjects. 1 1 The French especially do much serious mischief in this way, through their universal language and artistic mise en scene. The vanity of shewing a knowledge which they rarely have of foreign writers, the ostentatious generosity of the race towards other nations, the pro- pensity to please, even at the cost of truth — all these things comhine to make the French, like the Scotch, the propagators and promoters of much English illusion. More than this, they are creators of it by their very mission. They do not scrutinize materials, either objective or subjective ; they mind but the relations, the arrangement, the synthesis. The special estimates or other documents they take as offered by the CONCLUSION. 301 Another source of the exaggerated estimate in question is the nature of the specific department of the Teutons. Their province, being destructive, analytic, exploratory — conversant other races, and feel, responsible but for the logical or the artistic symmetry. In other words, and to use their own idiomatic form, they "put no conscience" in their writings, and for the reason that they have none ; to the opposite of the Teuton, who hunts a life-time for some silly circumstance. Hence the structures which they conjure from the coarsest materials — systems damned into a byword where they favour the Celts themselves, but when the subject is Teutonic, no less solid than magnificent. Thus that logical monstrosity, the English Constitution, was discovered by Montesquieu to be full of symmetry and profound purpose, and the phantasy is fostered by national vanity to this day. So the Icelandic nursery-tales of the good priest Saemund are taken up by Mallet and flamed to a theogony, which thenceforth robes the mythologic nakedness of the whole race, and which they fancy they have brought with them from the woods of Germany. The insouciance of the French as to their premises is no less familiar. It may be indicated even in things trivial to a proverb. For example, although they are of course well aware of the distinctions of race that demarkate these islands, the knowledge takes no hold on them in writing or conversation. Every act of any merit, although known to be by Scotch or Irish, is invariably mentioned as the feat of Un Anglais; while everything ridiculous is eccentricite Britannique. Now, without denying the English a proportion of the former, it is certain that they have the lion's share in the oddities. Indeed, this people are in most things inconceivable to the French, who have probably a less imperfect notion of the Japanese. The grand speculative enter- prise which they, as above noted, ascribe to the commercial or plebeian part of the nation, is exceeded in burlesque by the sentimental melancholy which they lend the aristocracy, from the reading of Ossian's poems ! So heedless are they of distinguishing these pure expressions of their own race, and of remembering the contemporary bncanneers of the Sound and Channel. It is another illustration of their debility of conscience, their inattention to the premises in favour of the conclusion, their pre- dominance of reason above reflection and sensation. They seize, in the 302 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEAEE. "with, matter and with space — makes greater shew. It imposes on the vulgar, both the popular and scientific, who can see (as Shakespeare has it) but " the great swing and rudeness"; while the organizing "fineness of the reason" would escape them. In fine, deplumed of those illusions, appropriations, exaggerations, "English genius" still rests largely on an error as to its nature. "What is this nature in the best samples that would remain as strictly Saxon, such as cited in the letter that provoked these explanations 1 It would be surely harsh to censure the highly learned man who has the modesty of owning that he knows them but from " biographies." Biographies, however, are but epitaphs expanded. The description is particularly true of the English ; not alone for the reasons of state and commerce above hinted, but also because biography is the vein of the nation. Being without philosophic power to seize the laws of the events, they are obliged to take the persons as their principles of grouping, and thus to view them as the sources, where they rather are mere results. Apprehending all society, as they do their own government, to be moved but by the arbitrary will of the governors, these are credited or charged with all that happens in good or evil. Hence the histories of this people are a jumble of biographies ; and their bio- English character, aright but two points. They have a vague notion of le cant and V egoism; but so vague that they can neither see their bearing on each other, nor explain by them deductively the least detail of the conduct. For those, in fact, are the two principles or poles of English life : the latter icy and repulsive with an " odic" flame of blue ; the other sunny and attractive, if contemplated aloof, but with the same antarctic icebergs when explored to the extremity. CONCLUSION. 303 graphies a species of selfish hero-worship — as discerned by those canny Scotsmen, Macaulay and Carlyle. 1 Newton, for example, is paraded by his countrymen as the alpha and omega of the science of astronomy. But it is obvious he is neither the one nor the other. In the progress of the science, it is a matter of mere record, that he is but a huh, and no disproportioned link. And then, besides, the link belongs to but the second of three phases to be explored successively for full knowledge of the subject. It accounts for but the actual operation of the solar system ; it abandons its formation; its history, to mystery. The law then of this history, which can alone complete the science, remains to be supplied by a greater still than Newton. And so of Bacon, Luther, and the rest, without exception : for not a single instance can be named from the whole race of a systematic passage beyond this plane of statics ; Locke him- self betrays it formally in his doctrine of the intellect, which is their usual static dualism, with Reflection uppermost. Tims the notion of gravitation, being grounded on the assumption of an equal attractive power in every particle of matter, is the individualism of the race applied to physics. To explain how this " wild democracy," with their conflicting rights of matter, have been reined into the order and organization of the cosmos, the Teuton can, with like con- formity, but bring a deus ex machina. He interposes the deity to launch the planets in their tangents, and also to give 1 It was also well remarked by the sagacious Bacon. In one of his incessant begging-letters for office, he says to the English monarch : " For I see your people better skill of concretum than of abstractum, and that the waves of their affections flow rather after persons than things." 304 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. the sun the power of thwarting these very motions ; and both, moreover, instead of postulating what were worthier of Omnipotence, the direct production of the resultant ellipti- city. Bacon places science and method in a like dispersive notion of a virtue in the physical and individual facts. And, in fine, Luther places sanctity and salvation in the individual, nay, in the individual sentiments — acts of judgment, faith, or conscience. Nor is this "blind side" of the race, when conceived properly, the least disparagement. For, in the first place, it is a necessary consequence of their function, the analytic faculty, excluding the synthetic ; and then that function is in turn a weak side of the Celtic intellect. For example, Descartes, a man of larger mind than Newton, yet presented us the Vortices instead of gravitation. "Why 1 Because his gentilitial province was construction de toutes pieces, and that he had not the materials, the analytic elements ; while Newton, with the contrary instincts of his race, was led to penetrate to these elements, but also cling to them materially. The latter had however the advantage of being " in order," and therefore good for what he did, whereas the Yortices were good for nothing. They were a case of the premature and thus imaginative efforts which in all tilings cast comparative discredit on the Celts. For the function of synthesis can be sound, because in season, but after the materials, both exterior and interior, have been furnished, in succession, by the two anterior races. This law of order may be briefly elucidated in the subject. The Boman or Ptolemaic notion of astronomy conceived the solar system in exterior — as a plane, a surface. Although a CONCLUSION. 305 Pole by birth and a priest by education, Copernicus was a Teu- ton and penetrated to the interior • accepting the Eoman agglo- meration as a mass, he endowed it with a conscience, centre, self, in the sun. Between these physical positions of centre and circumference, there opened round the vast intermediate inane, which could be spanned but by the race of combination and pure abstraction. Accordingly, the glorious Kepler, the Bavarian, 1 the Boiarian, launched his Celtic imagination, like 1 He was born in the adjoining duchy of Wirtemberg, but tbe rela- tion is tbe same to the site of the ancient Boii. Dr. Latham is quite right in suggesting that Bavaria is the true or the principal seat of this Celtic people ; and not Bohemia, save in another branch or earlier period. The former country is found by Zeus to have been named Boio-icare, or the residence of the Boii, as early as the sixth century ; the Germans already having added ware, which forms Bavaria. On the other hand, an late as the eleventh century, the Bavarians were still known by the old name of Boii. This region also, and not Bohemia, was perhaps the kingdom of the famous Maroboduus ; a personage whom the Germans continue to appropriate, although his state of civilization was as alien to them as the name. Indeed, this name would, to any one acquainted with the Celtic tongues, though it were met with in Japan, be pronounced to be Gallic. And yet no one dares say so, in opposition to the Germans. Since the foregoing was written, it has been observed that one of the Germans themselves does say so ; or rather a Bavarian, which is no doubt the cause both of the daring, and of the existence of the great woi'k which it appears in. Zeus, in his Grammatica Celtica, remarks on Maroboduus : nomen procul dubio ovigine Gerrnanicum, sed ut videtur ad etymologiam Gallicam transformatum a vicinis Gallicis ! " a name beyond doubt of German origin, but it would seem transformed to a Celtic etymology by the neighbouring Gauls.'' Thus the concession, it is seen, is made with such timidity as to force this learned writer to utter downright nonsense. For how should a name, imposed or altered by a foreign tribe, have extinguished the national and proper appellation, more especially in the case of a monarch of celebrity, and with the Romans whom he warred, and after lived, with for many years? o 2 306 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. Icarus, into the void ; but, unlike him in his fate and in the fruit of his daring, Dove-like, sat brooding on the vast abyss, And made it pregnant. Ill plain prose, he brought to light those grand synergical relations between the planets and the sun which are known as his Laws. Then recurred the Teuton turn to analyse the moving masses ; for Kepler, with the analytic weakness of the Celt, was obliged to view these aggregates as moved by a sort of life. Newton came, then, and extended the internal view of Copernicus not only to the several planets, but to their several constituent atoms, which he made, like the sun, all selfish, " attracting," acquisitive ; endeavouring to use each other, like Newton's countrymen, in trade and politics x : Besides, what was the German name that it could be " transformed" from ? and how could there have been a transformation of etymology'? In fine, if Gauls had made a change, the name would be constructed otherwise ; the adjective would probably have followed the noun. They would have made something like Boduo-marus, as they in fact did elsewhere in numberless instances ; such as Boduo-gnatus, Bod- incus, Bodo-tria, Boad-icea, etc ; the first part being the noun, and akin, no doubt, to Boii. The inverse order, then, would rather suggest a German meddling, as in the border people called the Teuto-bodiaci, The inversion is familiar in these islands from the like vicinage ; as of Dun-edin into i&Ziw- burgh, and of Linndubh into Dub-\in. The subjects too of Moro-boduus were by the Germans called Marco-mans, that is borderers, whose tribal designation they did not know. And what con- firms that they must have been Celtic like their king is, that this monarch, while he laboured to shield whole Germany from the Konians, was set upon by the real Germans, and expelled from his kingdom. Zeus, in fine, derives the name from the Irish words, mar (great) and baod (victory). 1 If this should appear fanciful, the doubter is reminded tbat the notion has been pushed into its literal expression, by another famous CONCLUSION. 307 and, on the other hand, when this competitory chaos of the planets was hy analogy reverted to the central or solar mass, he had hut merely to slide downwards the great methodic laws of Kepler to the atoms from the aggregates, as he him- self confesses candidly. This, however, in the details claimed a scope of combination, for which the Celtic vue cPensemble became again indispensible. It appeared in La Place, whose Mechanigue Celeste is the systematization of the statics of the subject. 1 But as a Celt, he must, like Descartes, try to pass up into history ; whence the crude and narrow notion of his Nebular hypothesis — crude and narrow because premature, but chiefly because clogged by the hypo- thesis of attraction, accepted from Newton. For though the sentiment of personality may symbolize the facts in space, and be in all things the necessary medium of analysis, it instantly misleads on passing into time, synthesis. The epicyclical system represents as well the facts ; the Newtonian has but furnished a formula more general ; it has not entered a hair's breadth into the causal plane of history, but merely given to its ignorance the name of " gravitation." There is here, then, much new labour for the Teutonic genius, with its instruments, statistics, itinerant associations, Teuton, a contemporary of Newton, and his rival in discovery, to wit, the great Leibnitz. For the " monads," which are really but a form of the attracting atoms, had not only this disposition, but most the others of the author's race. 1 Pour l'esprit generalisateur et synthetique, en memetemps qu' analytique, de Laplace, tout etail ou consequence ou cause oufonctious ou parties d'un autre fait ou d' un ensemble. — (Biog. Universelle.) The syn- thetic and Celtic intellect in general is here well marked. The analysis, which is also ascribed to Laplace and vulgarly thought his forte, is, how- ever, a mistake. What is so called in geometry is indirect synthesis. 308 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. in short its whole muscular paraphernalia of elaboration, before the Celtic mind can gather the great law of the synthesis. And thus (to point this exposition) the former of the races will, as usual, have the advantage of its greater " swing and rudeness," will parade as new discoveries each petty fact of the raw material to a public which at least has the five senses and a tongue ; whereas the " still" and abstract part of the methodizing Celts, though solely real, can have appeal but to the few or to the future. 1 The same remarks apply to Bacon and his sylva of rules and apothegms, which was the proper result of his ana- lytic function. The subject only is enormously more complex than astronomy : and hence his doctrine, with the subse- quent elaboration of two centuries, has, like it, still not reached to even hypothetical consistence ; it seems at present in the dead-lock of the " contradictory inconceivables," and not the less at home for this inconceivable contradiction. But an hypothesis attained to co-ordinate the facts, there would be after, as in astronomy, the evolutionary phase of history; the great synthesis which would combine it with the logic of Aristotle — from being absurdly antagonized with it — and thus construct the science of method. And this final opera- tion is here pre-eminently Celtic. In conclusion, even religion had, as the simplest of all those subjects, the disorder of Luther forthwith followed by a Celt, in the " Institutes " and iron fatalism of Calvin. 1 Vitium male judicantium, qui inajorem habere vim credunt ea qute non liabent artem ; ut effringere, quam aperire ; rumpere, quam solvere ; tradere, quam ducere, putant robustius . . . . et rudia politis majora, et sparsa compositis numerosiora creduntur. — Quinct. Instit. Orat. 11, 12. CONCLUSION. 309 7. It may be said, on seeing the English dwindle to these just dimensions, that the nation is not Teuton, but a cross of the two races. This idea is broached of late by some Englishmen of taste, and even the very newspapers talk less of Saxonism. But it is to be feared the expedient will not do. England proper, as defined, is quintessentially Teutonic. The induction would indeed follow from the well-known law of race, by which the element predominant in a mixed popidation absorbs the others with a promptitude proportioned to the overplus. A cross example of the effect is seen in Scotland and in Ireland. That in the former the slight infusion, whether Norman or Saxon, had been speedily absorbed into the national type, is attested by the history of her gallant aristocracy, who were generally as anti-English as the Highlanders themselves ; and the Lowlanders were otherwise but in pretence or policy. In Ireland, which was under the dominion of England, the absorption was counter- acted but by hanging the aristocracy, according as they became ipsis Hibemicis Mbemiores. The final result is the caput mortuum that still retains the name, and who are Celtic in their vices, sometimes talent, mostly blood; but are Saxon by training, by tradition, and by interest : and this applies to the whole people of the Pale and the North. 1 1 Mr. Doubleday's very curious and not unsound law of the correla- tive progression of increase and of extinction in a starving population and a riotous aristocracy, has rarely had a freer operation than in Ire- land. Nowhere was the misery so fruitfully " deplethorizing''; nowhere was the luxury so coarsely self-consuming. Not only eating, as in England, but also downright drunkenness, more sterilizing still, was universally habitual. Accordingly, it had been long whispered of the class that one might say of it with Juvenal: 310 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. So, on the Continent, the French are, to competent observers, as purely Gallic at this clay as they were in that of Caesar ; and the Spanish even make war, this most instinctive mode of action, in the same guerilla fashion as under Scipio and Sertorius, 1 and as the Irish did successfully on some occasions by their Eapperees — this mode of skirmishing befitting their agility and intelligence. All appearances in Spanish conduct at real variance with the Celtic type are but the remnants of the Konian discipline which weigh especially on her and Ireland, or the intrusion of the institutions and commercialism of the race of muscle, which, in both countries, distract their forces and travesty their functions, though provisionally requisite to shake them free from the Roman swathing- bands. How much more plain, then, must be the purity of race of the present English, who originally swept their area of the Transeo suppositos . . . Scaurorum nomina falso Corpore laturos, etc. Nobilis Euryalus pedissequurn esprimat infans. Even in the common English, a curious trace of the disappearance is the usage known as tenant-right, peculiar to " planted" Ulster. It had, like all customs, a spontaneous origin, and therefore its occasion in the special situation. This was, obviously, the frequency of sales of the " good will,'' or the interest in the holding by retiring tenants. And the retirements were due in part to the perilous state of property in a country where revolt against the foreigners was chronic, and would upon success be like to cost them land and life. Another motive was the trading spirit of the English. Thus, but few of the Saxon colonists now remain; and the Scots, who had been always far more numerous, were Celts. So that Ulster is at this day as Celtic as Munster. A fact, besides, evinced by its Presbyterianism, and even its Orangeism, which is as Celtic as Ribbonism. 1 Strabo, iv. 4. CONCLUSION. 311 native inhabitants until the rising wave resisted by mere mass in the north-west, and had alter to absorb but a slight coating of the same people. Another proof would be the ease with which they broke with Catholicity, as the Teutons did throughout, wheresoever they were pure ; a fact confirmed by the exception of Bavaria and the neigh- bouring regions, where the ancient Celtic element opposed a strong resistance. It is that religion was their first native act of intellect, as in all races ; as witness the grand hierarchy of the Celts in their primitive woods. But a proof beyond all inference historical or ethnographical is superadded by the principles first applied in the present pages. The public life of a nation, moral, mental, and political, must, as enormously more complex, be proportion- ably more conclusive, as to the gentilitial character, than any results of ethnology. But by this test the English are more Gothic than even the Germans. These in fact retain a good deal of the primitive simplicity, have never had the confidence of power or purse to act their nature, but on breaking off from Rome, have fallen over into France, and set themselves to imitate her speculation and bureaucracy. Accordingly, the purest and most forward of their States, the Prussian monarchy, is a species of Polonius among nations. 1 England and America present the type in full development, and do so, in every phase -without exception 1 It is only the other Jay that a decree was issued by the Prussian minister or government, enjoining the sub -officials that in saluting the high dignitaries, they should lower the hat "almost to the knee.'' Who shall say, after this, that the Teutonic race is not a race of organi- zation as well as of politeness? 312 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. of the national life. At least the writer would be thankful for information to the contrary. As to the Celts of the British islands, though nearly half the population, they have thus far no influence on the conduct of the nation. They are duly represented in the blood of the reigning dynasty, beneath whose weight the Liafail would long have groaned, were there force in destiny. IsTo doubt the exclusion is so absolute but indirectly or through the fact that the Teutons hold the land, and thus uphold the feudal mastery; while the Celts of even England are thrown into manufactures. Thus both Ireland and Scotland weigh as little in the institutions, and above all in the foreign policy, as Cormvall and Jersey. 1 This fact is quite fami- liar to the people of the Continent. In seasons of 1 This is doubtless not as flattering as national vanities could desire, and so the dose must be " got down " by some coercion, as in children. The means, as hitherto, will be example from the freshest experience, and in its most authentic or official expression, in order to bar the habitual evasory pleas of later change in the subject or imperfect know- ledge of the circumstances. The other day, in the British Parliament, there was broached a vote of censure on the butchery of several hundred prisoners in India. The English officer whose sense of military etiquette proposed it, well aware it would appear of the feelings of his own countrymen — whose " Humane Societies'' would however have stormed the Government with their declamatory deputations if a live cat were skinned in London — this old officer appealed, then, to the Irish and the Scotch members. But not a voice arose from either to renounce a complicity which would have been repudiated by the inmates of a penitentiary ; and the silence has been sanctioned by their national press and public. Now, either these two publics and their Honourable representatives must have consented to accept of this savage complicity, or else they must have felt that they had no real part in it ; that is to say, no part in the imperial administra- CONCLUSION. 313 the greatest moment, as in the late and the present wars, while every newspaper rag of London is cited by the Paris journals, as representative of some effective division of tion, and so no right to censure it beyond their own bailiwicks. From one or other of the positions there can be no escape for them ; and it must be less bad to be nothing than be infamous. Another fact more recent still, and more conclusive, if possible. Respecting the current war, a second Minister of the Crown has dared, in the face of the same Scotch and Irish deputies, to say that the sym- pathy and the support of the British empire would be given to a despotic and barbarous marauder, in upholding his feudal oppression of a glorious people and against a generous nation who came to their relief; and given through a "Teutonic brotherhood" with the marauder, in contempt of the Celtic brotherhood of Scotch and Irish with the liberator ! Could the expression of disdain for the opinion and the influence of these two pretentious nations have been possibly more sublimated? Were these Celts not esteemed null at once in spirit and diplomacy, it must be plain that no sane minister could have so spoken in the crisis. No doubt the "brotherhood" intended was less of blood than of booty, as the same sagacious statesman went on to let out, by adding that the title of Austria to Lombardy was the same as that of England to Scotland and India — the Green Isle being made conspicuous by omission in the list of conquest. But such a motive could but aggravate the disregard by insult. Yet both were here again succumbed to by the same Celtic lawmakers, as also by their constituents and their self-styled " fourth estate," without a murmur of even partizan remonstrance to the ministry ! Nothing, surely, could be added to these two notorious facts in con- firmation of the ignominious imputation of the text. This provincialized depression of the Scotch and Irish people, in relation to the general policy of the confederated kingdoms, remains, indeed, so low, that it must be near a crisis. Very possibly, the ministerial defiance was its death-knell. It might be deemed invidious to be the first to broach a party division between British Celts and Teutons. But since the English Government has broken itself the ice, the sooner the full and precise truth is known the better. This truth then is, that the political future of these islands is infallibly to turn on the following alternative: P 314 NEW EXEGESIS OF SHAKESPEARE. opinion, there is never an allusion to a press in Edinburgh or Dublin. In fact the force which their distraction and degradation have left the Irish has been hitherto consumed on either mere self-defence, or in the effort, as the saying is, to " get their head above water." The other people have been occupied in " feathering their nest." In this pursuit they are admitted, unlike the Irish, to grades of office, that might give the Celtic intellect at least some shaping influ- ence. But the Scotch have still a remnant of the " charity" of Portia's suitor. Can the English 'population continue to keep down the Celts to its own coarse, commercial civilization at home, and to drag it abroad in the train of that uncouth cohue of " consort" -trading princes, cabalistical philosophers and boorish or still barbarous hordes called the German empire ? Or shall the Celts, on the contrary, sway their Saxon fellow- citizens to domestic emulation and diplomatic concert with the glorious Celtic nation that leads the destinies of humanity ? The latter course alone can make the Irish Union real, and change the Anglo-French Alliance into a truth, from being a treachery. DISSERTATION THE SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. 1. It is a crude, although perhaps an universal, mistake to assume that heathenism was erased by Christianity. Crude, for it implies a transformation of the human mind, which neither history attests nor Christianity pretends to. The notion, therefore, is opposed alike to reason and to religion. In fact, the superstitions named collectively heathenism, are the natural, however weedy or wild, growth of the human soil. The new creed, if praeternatural or adventitious in its origin, could only crush them from above, but not extrude them by the roots. It went to famish them by shutting off the air and light of heaven. They however kept this sickly but still noxious existence by overrunning the ground, by usurping its juices, by even invading the towering dogmas of Christianity parasitically. To the spectator at a distance or viewing things merely on the exterior, the overspreading mass of forest-trees and foliage alone appeared. Christianity with its doctrines, disputations, worship, politics, would 316 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. really seem to have left no trace of its predecessor in the same countries. But on entering or looking closer into the wilderness of social life, a vast underwood of thick and tangled superstitions meets the eye, and offers all the leading features of heathenism, hut merely dwarfed. The change might perhaps he depicted as a subsidence of heathenism down into the popular masses, by the effect of social progress ; while Christianity was in its purity confined to the higher classes. Or the distinction may he indicated in the spheres assigned their agencies. "While the future was the object of the Christian dispensation, the beings of fancy that succeeded to the heathen divinities confined, as these had done, their proper sphere to the present life. They also operated on the physical world and in time ; whereas the province of Christianity Avas spiritual and eternal. But though the popular and lowest stratum in the Christian societies be the analogue and heir of the whole body in the heathen, the ancient forms must be modified in even that reclusion, by the natural reaction of the higher classes upon the people. This effect would bear especially on the distinctness of the notions. What was vague or rudimental in the primitive communities would, in the Christian, be concentrated and constituted with more art. For the nature of the whole production was an infant aetiology — as well applied and artificial as explanatory and natural — of the appearances and the events that most affected the nascent intellect. And the causation would take more system as the phenomena provoking it became unfolded through social progress to even the popular intelligence, from their material amalgamation in the heathen ages of mere DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT. 317 sense, up to detachment in succession of the moral and the social stages. This accordingly effects a natural division of such agents. And the division is not only based upon the corresponding objects, but is beside controlled concurrently by time, by place, and even by race. For those imaginary beings must be adapted to their fancied purposes ; and the purposes, in consequence of a gradation of complexity, could become subjects of spon- taneous speculation but successively. Thus the physical and outer world had been naturally earliest ; then the moral or the personal, as the re-agent against the physical. The relational or rational and social order of phenomena must be, as based upon the personal and physical, attained the latest. So in turn the three classes of mystic agents, as of their objects, would relate severally to the past, the present, and the future, and exhibit the same order in their rise as in their functions. The like series should be discovered in their geographical predominance, as bearing on the bine of evolution of civilization. In fine, the nations or the races that occupied such positions must be respectively the authors of the three branches of this mythology. All these series are moreover corollaries to one another, as well as conse- quences of the nature or the law of all progression. We are therefore in possession of a threefold criterion for determining the species, the attributes, and nationality of all these creatures of superstition which continue to be huddled without order or appropriation of function, epoch, object, origin. The division of kind or species gives our Witches, Ghosts, and Fairies. 318 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. These are known to relate duly to the three parts of time, and also to the three gradations of abstraction in humanity. The first are fancied to account for or act on things already done ; the second, on things present or urgent to be done ; the third, on things gerundative or congruous to all time. Again, the witches are still human and praeter- natural but in their functions ; the ghosts are human in their functions, but praeternatural in organism; the fairies are praeternatural in organs and functions both, holding merely to humanity in its forms, physical and social. The order of their rise, as of their prevalence, in Europe is, like the course of civilization itself, from east to west, and with the corresponding races — Eomanic, Gothic, Celtic. These criteria are not pretended to be trenchantly exclu- sive — a pretension which indeed would stamp untruth on the division. The distinction in a series of progression really natural can be but that of relative predominance, or type : for in nature there is nothing wholly different from any other thing, but merely more or less so, with relation to the things - compared. It must be evident to bare experience that the several races named, intermingled as, besides, they have for ages been Avith each other, must have in some degree adopted each other's visions, if not concurred in them. But yet the native is always separable from the foreign or feebler form, as will be clear, it is expected, from the ensuing exposition. . WITCHES. 2. The witches, as above deduced, are in reality of Eoman origin ; Canidia, with her malign incantations, is the WITCHES. 319 classic type : oven Medea wrought for good, and drew her powers from the gods. For malicious ope rat ton, by physical means, and in consequence or explanation of past occurrences, combines the triple character of this lowest form of the supernatural. Witches, says Eeginald Scot in later times, are divided into three sorts : the first can hurt but not help ; the second help, but not hurt ; the third can help and. hurt both. 1 The functions here, it is perceived, are all directed to past occurrences — the help, as a remedy ; the hurt, as an explanation. Both the processes have also the Eoman stamp of practicalit}'. The physical nature of the instruments and charms is commemorated in the circumstance that sor- ceresses were termed poisoners (venifices) ; a combination no less famous, it has been seen, with the Italians. Other titles are no less characteristic of this race. Such was Una, a female go-between or procuress ; an exigence no less appro- priate to the race of cellularity. This is also why Horace joins Canidia with Priapus ; and the attribute passed down to the witches of the middle ages, when much of the disgust- ing litigation on divorce used to turn on the impotence or potence dealt by witches. Even the sole designation allusory to knowledge reflects equally the race of mere sensile pene- tration. This was saga, the least odious of the several appellatives, though but a metaphor from the sagacity or sense of smell of the dog. The Eoman prototype becomes, however (like that people itself), less vulgar or human, more spiritual or mystical, in passing downward, as seen so early as Petronius and Apuleius. The strange witch-wrought metamorphoses of the latter are familiar : they represent a ! Witchcraft Discovered, etc., p. 6. 320 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. passage from the classic to the Christian forms. Gibbon in his history remarks npon Petronius : " Striga (the screech- owl) is used as the name of witch. It is of the most classic origin ; and from the words of Petronius (quae striges come- derunt nervos tuos ?) it may be inferred that the prejudices (i.e. Avitchcraft) was of Italian rather than barbaric origin." For the barbarians, that is the Teutons, have generally had the credit of giving all things, even witches and fairies, to Europe ; all tilings except precisely what they did give, the ghosts. No doubt, however, there had been a sort of witchcraft before the Boman. Later nations but unfold what lay in germ in their predecessors. In fact, the jugglers of the Indians, east and west, are the witch in embryo ; Medea, too, with the Colchians generally, and the Thessalians, advanced the art. But the witch of Poman fashion and Christian times was widely different. The name must for this reason be misapplied, in the Bible, to those diviners or cataleptics who told the future and raised the dead. The famous personage of Endor, if proceeding on a past event, did not operate by virtue of a physical concoction ; she called up a ghost by means of her "familiar spirit." Both the instrument and object are remarkably illustrative of the great social order of development just stated. As there were witches before the Pomans, so there were ghosts before the Teutons. But the gentilitial antetype of the Teutons were the Jews. It is seen then, how doubly conformable to theory are both the " ghost" and " spirit" of the pythoness of Endor. Ear is it less so, that the ghosts did not as yet appear spontaneously, as in the race in which the spiritual development is more advanced; WITCHES. 321 and that the evocation was effected through a " spirit," still " familiar," that is, concretely individual in the primitive Jew, but abstracted and generalized by the Teutons into the devil. Xow since the Bonians were as opposite to the Jews as to the Teutons, and gave, as seen, the mode of witch, which formed the groundwork of the modern — for both the reasons there must have been mistranslation in the English Eible. So thought also Walter Scott, who, though for reasons merely critical, denies the "witch of Endor" to be more than a mere fortune-teller. This vindication for the witches of a Eoman nationality explains the burthen of the book of the relentless Scot afore- said — who was normally among the first to assail them, as an Englishman, or as a Scot turned English, which is something still more outre. His discovery (that is to say, exposure) of witchcraft consists in tracing an alliance between the witches and the Eoman priesthood. But he mistakenly supposed it an alliance, not affinity ; a thing of concert, not concomitance ; of religion, not of race. And the error was then pardonable, since it prevails still. If the Eoman or Italian priest- hood wielded witchcraft to serve their influence, it must have been because their people Avere peculiarly affected to it. And, accordingly, it may be doubted that the thing had, in Italians, so much fraudulent intention as among the fellow races. 3. To these races the superstition passed in fact with the Eoman religion. The foreign origin is attested in the Teutonic idioms by the soundest etymology of the word witch, which is tcichte, or thing. The generality of this 322 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. designation, which is elsewhere retained in wight, betrays the vagueness that attends an artificial or foreign notion. Mark, accordingly, how significant and savouring of the soil are all and each of even the several Konian names above alluded to. It was also this alien nature and kin aversion to the Eoman religion that led the Teutonic communities to relax first the laws on witchcraft ; not the more advanced humanity or intelligence imagined. They never naturally, zealously, instinctively believed in it ; and the same credit it ever had, it seems to retain to this day, not merely with the English peasantry but with the yeomanry, if not the " Lun- noners." The revelations which a year or two ago appeared in the newspapers elucidate the origin and the amount of this credence. They show the faith in the witches, where it holds to any principle, to rest upon the Bible in the mistrans- lation noted. To that effect was the reply of a yeoman of the dupes to the indignant magistrate who questioned him upon the folly ; and assuredly the pious judge would have been puzzled to rebut it. But in other and no doubt the generality of the cases, the thing proceeds, in dupe and witch, from that spirit of acquisition to which the English wit assures us, most probably from observation, that The pleasure is as great, Of being cheated, as to cheat. For, paradoxical though it may seem, the commercial races are, of all, the most lenient to impostors and quacks. Deception appears to have a sort of fascination for them. They may know that the pretence is, as Americans say, humbug ; they may laugh at it or denounce it, but still they WITCHES. 323 cam nit keep from, dipping in it ; and should any honest zealot interfere to expose it, he may meet the usual fate of mediation in family quarrels. This fact, combined with the debility of the ratiocinative faculty, alone explains the singu- larity, in both the English and Americans, of a credulity almost childish in relation to things spiritual, side by side •with an unrivalled sagacity in physical business. It is that they keep constantly the nose to the earth. And then their belief in abstract matters being but negative, it serves their positive and business avidity as a sort of playground, ■where the mind pursues the game for the sake of the exercise. So that the witchcraft of the English yeomanry could not be fairly construed to imply the brute stupidity or superstition of the middle-ages. The use which it is put to should be weighed in the account. For the more the calcu- lation, the less the superstition. Indeed, the main modification of the witches by the Teutons is formulized in the trading term of a compact made with Satan. Glanville defines a witch to be : " One who can do or seem to do strange things, etc., by virtue of a covenant with evil spirits. 1 Perkins says expressly : " by contract with the devil." Thus the git of the belief was in the devil, not the witches, the latter being regarded as but adventitious tools. It marks the passage of their virtue from the physical magic of the Eomans to the spiritual magic which is proper to the race of personality ; or from the occult powers of nature to the as occult powers of will. Thus it is seen that the intro- duction of this dark personage as party is, no less than the commercial attribution, in due character. !Now, the devil 1 Saducismus Triumpliatus, p. 269. 324 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OP SHAKESPEARE. being thus principal, who could have scrupled to rob his agents ? This hypothetical syllogism was, accordingly, the warrant of many a clerical prosecution of the witches in England. It might have been a fair business transaction upon the principles. But then these principles were, as usual, the contrary of the Italian. The Italian witch controlled as well the devil as the elements, and usually confounded their malign influences together ; the Teuton witches controlled but nature, and by commission from the devil, the prince of the realm of spirits and ghosts. Thus the witches were as naturally aids to the Eoman priesthood, as they were victims of prosecution and of plunder to the Teuton. The error was to let the name, which these imposed upon the borrowed notion, disguise the absolute contrariety of the thing in their conception. It is the ludicrous foundation of declamations still subsisting about many graver usages of the same people than witchcraft : that is to say, if politics should be consi- dered graver, or indeed other than a species of witchcraft of the nineteenth century. As thus conceived in its simple Teutonic transformation, the superstition is defined admirably by Eeginald Scot : " a supernatural work between a corporal old woman and a spiritual devil." The reader will remark the strict conformity of these cpiaint terms with the distinc- tions above deduced between the witch, the ghost, and fairy. Thus far for the Teutonic adaptation of the witch, which made her of the category that " can hurt but not help"; for the devil helps nobody unless to his ruin. To counteract the malefactions of him and Ins witch agents, it therefore became requisite to institute a second class, endowed with WITCHES. 325 functions of course the very contrary of the former. They composed the useful category that could " help hut not hurt," and were also termed "White, as the Eoman were thenceforth Black. For with the Teutons the hue of goodness as well as heauty is whiteness, as with the Italians it is hrownness, and with the ftegroes the glossiest jet. Thus the White were, it is evident, a mere reflection of the Black witches, not an original production of the gentilitial phantasy. To have adopted from the Romans the suhstance of the superstition, analysed it to the hypothesis of a contract with the devil, and then repeated a counter-copy to defeat the devil's hire- lings — such has heen the precise part of the Teutonic race in witchcraft. It is as consonant that the "White witches were rather irrojjliets than pragmatists — in theological equivalence, referred to "faith," and not to " works." Tor the great need of the race of muscle is not action, hut intelligence. Like its Homeric symhol Ajax, it asks hut for the light. 1 Being without reasoning power or principles to deduce ahsent or future events, it requires to he told them constantly and directly hy persons. Hence it has heen in antiquity the race of prophets and revelations, as it is in modern times the race of preachers and of newspapers. Thus the witch faith, in all the forms, sat so loosely on the English that they commonly applied it to the uses of solid interest. The very vulgar, it is notorious, drove a traffic in 1 ohs b(pdaXfioL(xiv ISiffdai. — Iliad, 1. xvii. Or as Pope renders : Lord of earth and air ! Oh King, oh Father, hear my humble prayer ; Dispel this cloud, the light of heaven restore ; Give me to see, and Ajax asks no more. 326 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. the business. Mathew Hopkins, the famous " Witch-finder- General," as he was titled (thus implying a regular hierarchy) was but the luckiest sample. Walter Scott, in his interesting book on Demonology, recites some others, which mark a curious gradation in the practice, and which are the more significant for the unconsciousness of the writer. So late as the high noon of the last century, an aged pauper woman of a parish in Staffordshire was seized by a mob and " put to swim," by dragging her about through a pool of water till she expired : whereupon the chief-justice of the trial took round his hat, to collect money for the piece of entertainment to the spectators. The writer mentions this but as a sample of brutality. He did injustice in overlooking the commercial extenuation, and that there was a blending of the utile et clulce. ]S"or was the useful merely personal, but also public. While, at first, the victims usually selected for prosecution, as by witch-finders, like Hopkins, and also by the clergy, were persons of some property (which fell by law to the informer) ; towards the end, and when this vein had been worked out to exhaustion, the objects became paupers, and the prosecu- tors mobs and magistrates. For this a patriot might devise a philosophic explanation. As the Romans, a race of pater- nity and voluptuousness, converted into witches unnatural and noxious, their antipathy to woman in her barrenness or old age ; so did the Teutons, it might be argued, a race of property and commerce, mistake the like impersonations of their antipathy to poverty. It has, however, been suggested that the onslaught on the " paupers " was the work of the " parish-officers " as principals or prompters, and that so the English horror was less for witches than for taxes. witches. :527 In fact, the author just referred to relates a crucial attestation. 1 On the acquittal of a pauper woman from this economic charge, the Country gentleman, one Sir John Long, on whose estate she was quartered, came in seeming conster- nation to supplicate the judge that she might not he allowed to return to her hut, as in that event his tenants all threatened to leave him. Here assuredly is a contravention of the theory, says some critic ! "What a sottish faith in witchcraft, exclaims some foreign reader ! "What a moral elevation, that drives to sacrifice house and home rather than remain in con- tact with the reprobate, cries some Englishman ! Very well, gentlemen, but let us hear the sequel. The Court, in com- passion for the peril of the landlord, decreed the woman should be kept by the town of her acquittal, but at the cost to her native parish of half-a-croicn a week. Here was a pointed issue between faith in witchcraft and faith in money. But the very next assizes, Sir John Long and his Teuton tenantry petitioned the same court for the return of the witch, alleging as the sole motive that they could support her cheaper at home by a shilling a loeelc. Nothing surely could be added to the pith of this example, unless it be the adage ascribed by Osburn to the English: "that the witches are unable to hurt until they receive alms.' 1 '' A word to the wise ! And this word, while it assuredly supplied a fair pretext for buttoning the pocket against the pauper witches, suggests also the rationale of the Poor- Laws of England, accredited, as usual, to a source the very opposite. The motives on the part of the English witches were no 1 Demonology and Witchcraft, p. 268. 328 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. less national. The formal stipulations of their "contract with the devil," for allowing him, as the terms were, to suck them or to incubate, were : that " they never should want victual, clothes, or money.'''' For this they made over soul and hody to the demon, or in the formula of the indictments : quemdam malum spiritum negotiare. Indeed, this singular superstition of the succubi and incubi was an exact reflection from the mirror of the conscience, of the position the Teutons held in Europe in those ages, and which they still retain, in one or other of the qualities. Where they have ceased to squeeze by force, they continue to suck by commerce. 1 4. The Celtic notion of the Witches was a compound of the two preceding, in due coincidence with the progression above assigned in the division, and exhibited in the portrayal of the three races by Shakes peare. The Celts, in fact, did not derive the fancied power of the witches, like the Eomans, from physical nature, nor like the Teutons from the spiritual ; they placed it in their own social superstition, the fairies — above explained to be creations of intermediary consistence. This fact of presidence of the fairies, in the place of the 1 This affinity of the pursuits of the soldier and the merchant, so much noted in the present volume, may to some appear a paradox. There is, however, nothing more natural or consequent. The actuating principle of both of them alike, in primitive times and thus in races, is acquisition, rapacity. The means alone are altered with the progress of society, — not through a change of nature, — from open force to fraud. This deduction is confirmed by all history, and even mythology. The Merchant caste of India were, according to the myth, on the mother's side Warriors, ana on the father's Merchants. — "Colebrooke, Asiat. Res." ix. p. 79. WITCHES. 329 Teuton demon, lias repeatedly been established in the Scotch courts of justice. It is crudely misconceived in one of Glanville's Irish cases, reported with the usual discernment by the English, and in which a fairy company that delegate a witch are represented as a meeting or Sabbath of witches. Thus, each of the races, in borrowing from the previous, conceived the importation on its own specific principle — pre- cisely as they have done and must do in real life. But as the Teutons were, in consequence of this interpretation, conducted to erect a second category of witches, the philo- sophy, to be consistent, must shew the Celts to have done likewise • for while the principle had become opposite, how should the agent remain unmodified. In fact, the conse- quence is answered in a third and last class, the " Grey Witches." The designation, it is seen, compounds the Black and the White, with the singular exactness of scientific truth. The functions likewise are combined, the Grey ones " helping and hurting both" — precisely as do their principals themselves, the fairies ; while the White and the Black could, like their principals, do but either. It may be added that the colour grey moreover consorts with the assigned etymology of the Irish name for witch, and also with the knowledge incidental to age. So harmoniously do these distinctions, which are taken for futile whimsies, but which j are organic necessities, receive their reason from a sound theory. The composite description of the Celtic idea of witches explains, accordingly, the Weird Sisters, the chief occasion of this discourse. Here in fact is the historical genesis of these moot beings. The witches, oraculizes the rhapsodical p2 330 SUPERNATURAL MACHINES'* OF SHAKESPEARE. Coleridge, " are as much a creation of Shakespeare's genius as Caliban." The comparison might he granted without detriment to the fact — which is, that Shakespeare added nothing, in either nature or number, to the story in the chronicles of Fordun and Wintoun. Indeed he rather fell short of the fairy characters there given them, and should, instead of Hecate, have made their mistress Queen Mave ) as he does not fail to clo where he deals with pure fairies. He was misled by this shortcoming — itself a result of his English position — to take the Celtic combination at too low and crude a point, and make the witches collate the physical concretions of the Eoman, with the Gothic prophetism and evocation of ghosts. This will obviate the charge of ignorance that has been made on Shakespeare for introducing Hecate among the modern witches ; for Hecate was the Queen of the real and Eoman witches. The proper charge had been, that he — instead of "creating" them — has fallen somewhat short of his Scoto-Celtic models. But the approximation is only wonderful in the circumstances ; and the default also is in large part corrected by making the weird sisters interpre- ters of Fate. The second order of this modern or Christian mythology, as of the praeternatural machinery of Shakespeare, was just alluded to as proper to the Teutons, namely Ghosts. GHOSTS. 5. That ghosts were seen by other people than the Teutons, and before them, has not only been conceded, but implied in the definition. All the races, it was premised, but repeat, in higher development, the social parts which were GHOSTS. 331 presented, in lower degree, by their earlier analogues : and this as well in the fantastical as in the real world, the intellectual laws being indeed in both the same. Thus with the Jews, the Witch of Endor had evoked the ghost of Saul. But this as yet was scarce a ghost-seeing, as the appear- ance was not spontaneous. In fact, tins people could have no notion of a ghost in the modern sense, as they had none of a post-mortem existence at all ; for men have never beheld ghosts till they supposed they might be seen, and consecpiently not till they conceived them to exist. Hence there is no real mention of such in the Bible ; the case referred to was not Saul's ghost, it was Saul himself redivivus. The Greek -mind was more advanced, but it was media- torial, rational, like the Celtic in the modern cycle, and thus unpersonal, unghostly. The superstition might, however, make a step in the warrior-class. Accordingly, by a pro- fundity which will be now appreciated, Homer makes Achilles — this type of muscle, war, and selfishness — see the ghost of that Patroclus he is longing for and lamenting. Virgil did but copy him in Hector's apparition : and he did so with the fate of imitation, however elegant — the fate indeed of all poetry directed by volition, and not inspired by nature, as in Homer and Shakespeare ; for ghost-seeing was less proper in the case of the "pious iEneas" than in that of the fierce gij^vus or man-smashing Achilles. The real or historic apparitions of classic Borne almost dwindle to the sole instance of that of Csesar to Brutus. And this has been resolved, without the least view to system, by both Hobbes and Walter Scott, to a perturbed waking 332 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. dream or vision. Ghosts proper 1 became visible to the Eomans but with Christianity, when they incurred, as did their religion, the ridicule of Lucian, and when the mixture of the Teuton hordes brought on the night in which to see them. The ghost of Pallas that scared off Alaric was the first true one seen at Athens ; and there seen but by the Goth and by his Teutonic host. 2 Ever since the " Vaterland " is the land of visions of all descriptions, from the famous giant of the Hartz mountains up or down to Luther's Satan, and the as famous phantasma- goria of the philosopher NicolaT. From this condition of the leading minds, one may conclude of the popular state. The great Eeformer was so familiar a believer in these ghostly visits that he held, it is known, disputes in theology with the arch-fiend ; and used habitually to floor him — a thing of course, the man being painter. Nor was this state at all peculiar among men of mind to Luther ; it was quite com- mon to his fellow-leaders of the reform in the same race. 1 The umbra, the manes, and the spiritus of the classics were theo- logical speculations, not popular superstitions. 2 The reasoning of Gibbon in discredit of this story is no deeper than his ordinary range in philosophy. It was not requisite, as he implies, that the Barbarian should have read Homer, or been acquainted, from any source whatever, with Greek mythology. The first thing learned in those ages respecting foreign nations, and especially in purposing hostilities against them, was the particular god who was esteemed to be their guardian. To the Goths, who had already been perhaps for generations either making or meditating forays upon Greece, the name and notion of Pallas would be awfully familiar ; as her aegis had been doubtless paraded with the more terror as the people to be shielded by it sunk to wiles from valour. But ghosts are the reflection, not of " knowledge,'' but of fear. 333 The subject Las been first and successively theorised by the famous German -wizards, Agrippa and Voetius. The leaning still continues in even the philosophers, though in a meta- physical or evanescing form. What, for instance, is the universe-begetting Ego of Fichte, but a gigantic ghost, with the " Absolute" for its Brocken 1 Nay, the " Baconian logic " has been perfectly applied to it, in the famous " odic force " of the Baron Eeichenbach. • AYith the English, the apparitions are less expansive and impersonal — this people, even here, being for the simple and substantial. But the ghosts are no less frequent among even the educated. As was shown of the correlative disposition of Conscience, there are perhaps in the English language more books upon the subject than in any, if not all, others — those at least of the Celtic nations. The French, who have a book on everything, have perhaps none on ghosts : the old treatise of Bodin on Demonomania treats of apparitions but slightly and incidentally. They have no word to designate the notion with precision ; the name revenant denotes but one returned from the grave, without the least distinction as to body or spirit. The Irish likewise had to borrow their name sprid from the English spirit. While with the Teutons, the word geist not only specifies the difference, but amalga- mates the intellect itself with the soul or spirit, by a profound confirmation of their mental character as now expounded. For, in this speculative dualism, every thing that is not body with its tangible sensation, must be lumpt in the alternative ; and this negation, from being felt to be the actuating principle or that which made them go or went itself, was termed go-ist. To this they after, in its thinking quality, gave the kin name 334 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. of ~Un&er-sta?iding ; as also the borrowed designation of Eeflexion. So strictly true is it, that with this people the mind was always conceived muscularly ; as activity is, on the other hand, absorbed in intellect with the Celts. This will suffice to explain how the subject of ghosts should have figured so extensively in even the gravest Eng- lish literature. Solemn speculative writers might be counted by the dozen — not to mention the trade speculators such as Daniel Defoe, who wrote on ghosts and on the devil, as on most other English hobbies. Eor example, the learned tomes of More, Baxter, and Glanville — the last of them the Saducee Discomfited above cited. All of these maintain the simple reality of ghosts ; and their manner is no less characteristic than the matter. It is by an elaborate collection of cases, supported by affidavits, documents, dates, localities. Glan- ville presents a phalanx of some thirty of these ghost-stories ; and his editor, Dr. More, reinforces him with several others. And both the batches have been sifted with such philosophic rigour that many more, the authors are sure, might have been added, but that they were defective in some item of authen- tication : as, for instance, the name of the person who saw. the ghost, or even the particular locality, or hour of night. Here assuredly was a sample of those admirable English faculties, of keeping to the "facts" and proceeding by " induction." And, in sooth, the basis, too, is by no means more chimerical than in the common uses of the Baconian method. Nor are these scrupulous inquirers less national in object. It is not to establish the abstract truth of ghosts, without keeping an eye, as Bacon would himself, to the useful. This GHOSTS. 335 we are let into with similar naivete, where Dr. More antici- pates his public as objecting to these ghostly " abstractions " on the score of unproductiveness. In reference to even the Free-thinkers themselves, who are wont by some perversity to be the uppermost in intellect, he says : "I know by long experience that nothing so rouses them out of their dull lethargy, etc., as narrations of this kind [i.e., ghost-stories]. For they being of a thick and gross spirit, the most subtle and solid deductions of reason do little execution upon them ; but this sort of sensible experiments cuts them and stings them so very sore, that by a less considerable story by far than this of the Drummer of Taedworth or of Anne Walker, a Doctor of physic cried out instantly : ' If this be true, I have been in the wrong box all this time, and must begin anew.' " Thus the ghosts were the logic employed in England against the infidels. Indeed, the subject split the learned into a series of pitched parties, bearing in succession such euphonious appel- lations as Holenmerians and Nullibists, Psychopyrists and Psychohy lists. It was the great age of that English speculation which has later been admired in the continental Teutons, with their countless schools or parties, whether profane or sacred, from the Absolutists and the Egoists to the Elohists and the Jehovists. For all discussion, with this fine muscular race, is a trial by battle ; a contention, not for truth, which as being a pure abstraction or relation, can to them have in reality no meaning ; but for victory, for party, and through party, for self. Nothing is accordingly more rare in English writers, or even in the German, than the judicial temper. No sooner have this people taken pen, nay entered pulpit, than they 336 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. seem as if to fall into the pugilistic attitude ; no sooner are they met for any public consultation than they sunder into parties, or at least party designations ; for the names contain the essence of the matter with true Nominalists. A striking illustration of the fact occurs to memory. In 1848, when the thirty states of Germany, galvanized as usual by the ferment in. France, were rushing, with the haste and the self-sacrifice of Hamlet, for at least the thirtieth time into the fusion of " nationality," and a constituent Parliament was formed ad hoc, consisting largely of their great professorial philosophers, no sooner were these bearers of the urgency, enthusiasm, unanimity, fraternity, assembled in council, than they were forthwith seen to divide off into two parties, respectively bannered by the names Historical and Philological. The Historians insisted on bringing into the German Union all the nations, or at least the territories, which their ancestors had overrun ; for these were evidently comprehended by the term historic Germany. The Philologers, apprehending that there might be some difficulty in executing this construction beyond the Pthine and the Pyrenees, were for fusing the new nation on the basis of languages — aware, from their experience in " annexing " tbe Hymmelayas, that grammatical affinities were less refractory than modern Celts. The contention thus proceeded till the enthusiasm had collapsed and the reaction brought them back into their feudal principalities. But what a proof, exclaims the reader, of intellectual eminence in a people who debate the homeliest subjects philosophically. Yes, no doubt, but the ghost-debating of the English proved the same, although this people have lost the faculty with the emergence of their " common sense." And both the sorts of GHOSTS. 337 speculation are amongst the fairest titles of the Teutons to the Brail mi nic extraction which they boast. When the ghosts were thus the logic and speculation of the English learned, it is easy to conclude of the belief in them with the public. It is curious to observe from the writers above cited, that they formed the chief topic, not alone of conversation, but even of correspondence among the English nobility, both with each other and with their brethren in Ireland, nay, on the continent. The great Dutch polemic, Limborchius himself, communicates (as the Methodists express it) his "experiences." The no less famous Jeremy Taylor holds, in his Irish see, an episcopal court to authenticate a ghost- story. It is not foreign to the purpose to remark that in the Irish quota, where the fairies and the witches are often jumbled with the ghosts, yet this ignorance itself has repre- sented scarce an instance of the ghostly apparitions as made to a native. Those who saw or heard the ghosts, whether servants or masters, are all English in name, as well as evi- dently in nature. And this nature still persists to our own day in even the learned, where it only takes the form of explaining the illusion, as in the " Theory of Apparitions " of Dr. Ferrier, the " Philosophy of Apparitions " of Dr. Hib- bart, and, in Germany, the " Essay on Apparitions " of Meyer, etc. For this pre-occupation with the thing as even illusion is equally expressive of its gentilitial prevalence. More decisive than speculation, theological or philoso- phical, is the testimony to the trait by the sure instinct of poetic genius. Shakespeare has been sneered at for propen- sity to ghosts. But the disposition was not in Shakespeare, who did not write to please himself ; he only wrought upon Q 338 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. it as a main-spring of interest with his public. And a proof of this is, that when the nature of his subject forbade absolutely, as in Cymbeline, the introduction of this element, the players were forced, as has been noted, to add a ghost- scene of their own. Ghosts, indeed, are thence the dominant machinery of Shakespeare. And what shews that he but followed as well history as observation is, that they prevail chiefly in the historic plays. For here the characters are all Teutonic, whether Norman or Anglo-Saxon. Nay, he gives us a philosophy of the phenomenon in two hues, and by confession of his type of the Norman variety : Shadows to-night Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers. Duly also in the piece of Hamlet, so pre-eminently ethni- cal, an apparition makes the foremost, and with English spec- tators, the first figure. The awe still struck by this familiar and grotesque spectre is truly national. Such a personage on the French stage would be hooted as coarse pantomime. No doubt the effect on the English is exalted by the " dumb show," which addresses more impressively the eyes than the intellect. 1 But due allowance being made for this, there 1 This is likewise the explanation of other traits of the nation. The English public of even the capital have thronged for five successive years, or over seventeen hundred nights, to see a picture of Mont Blanc. Nothing could attest more strikingly the intellectual inertness which gives this people what is lauded as their steadiness and perseverance. Not however that their adhesion to routine is an attachment ; this would contravene their tendency and mission of destroying the past. The persistence is a necessity, an impotence of rational projecture. The abstract reason for GHOSTS. 339 ■will remain a residue to be accounted for but by the other Character in question. It is this specialty of the nation that compelled Shakespeare to lug in ghosts, on even occasions when incongruous with the characters, as in Macbeth. For here, in fact, they are, as has been shewn, a superfaetation. a change they cannot fore-apprehend, or at least it is outweighed by the physical actuality ; while the latter has a peremptory reason in its mere existence, and of course every change, when once effected, in the same sanction. Thus they gain in resignation -what was lost in resistance, and reconcile the seeming contraries of routine and reform. This philosophy of the present was accordingly erected by the first intellect of their race into an axiom of method : it is Leibnitz's famous dogma of the " sufficient reason.'' And that this was in reality negation of all reasoning is elucidated by the " sufficient grace " of the Jesuits, so well convicted of denying both the " compulsory '' and the " efficacious." Thus the English have at all events high authorities for their routine, and for continuing it indefinitely till diverted by physical obstacles. Accordingly their rulers are concurrent, if not careful, in avoiding as far as possible all sensible mutations. Thus, for instance, they rebuilt the new Houses of Parliament, not alone with all the trap- pings of the mediaeval Gothic, but in the mediteval site become a swell- tering cess-pool, where the air must be hermetically shut out in summer, to save the law-makers from asphyxia by the means of suffocation. For if diversified by a building new in form or locality, the English Parliament might come to be suspected by the people of being no " fixture " in the frame of nature, nor even the axle of the social system. It has been recently' proposed to concentrate to one edifice, or at least one enclosure, the various London courts of law, which lie dispersed, like all the rest, in genuine national disorder. The motion is ominous, if it was not insidious. Such a building must inevitably be the first step towards giving any system to the chaos of English law. The French Celts began their code from general axioms of jurisprudence. The English Teutons must begin upon a pile of brick or granite, by the means of which they may be led to crawl to the conception of a unity 340 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. Did the poet intend himself to signalise the incongruity, in employing the power of witchcraft to raise the ghosts before Macbeth, as if this Celt would not he capable of seeing them of himself ? For the spectre at the banquet, which presents itself spontaneously, might mean but the excitement of the Celtic imagination at the moment of being told of the suborned murder, and would thus be like the vision above mentioned of Brutus, or even a case of Macbeth's own of aggregation in the laws therein administered. Accordingly this preamble will he shirked as long as possible, and the more surely that the fee interests are here in concert with the feudal. In short, this tactic is the life of the English constitution. Shake- speare perhaps had an eye to it in his graphic description of that kindred construction, a " German clock" : Still a repairing, ever out of frame ; And never going right, although a watch, But being watched that it may go aright. This process of perpetually watching the watch is an exact definition of the pretended " self-government." Concurrent with the muscular pro- pensity to meddling runs the interest of the real governors that the mend- ing be but tinkering. Between both it is a tugging of mere action and reaction, wbich, with the mass of the abuses, might last a century of Plato's years. Hence it is that for the most reforming period of thirty years back, a statesman of sagacity could lately tell the public, that not a single measure has been passed to law in Parliament, with any reference to rational merits, but as a result of external pressure. And the statement would apply without a colour of exception to the cart- loads of the secular legislation of the country. The same intellectual frame that left this lumber to the English is practised on no less in their commercial undertakings. For example, in even the literary firms of the higher journals, the policy is said to be to keep the flatest uniformity — to serve up indefinitely the same national dish. But if the dish in this case be less the good roast beef, than the " made " or manu- factured ones of fricassee or hash, it is doubtless that the mental stomach is less robust than the physiological. GHOSTS. 341 national second-sight. This would doubtless be, however, to give Shakespeare too nice consciousness. The intervention of the Witches is due more probably to the distinction, that the offspring of Banquo had not yet lived in the flesh, and so their ghosts could not appear a parti ante in the usual way, but must be summoned from the womb (not the grave) of time by the powers of destiny. In fine, the genuine post-mortem and personal ghost enjoyed a credit, even public, till quite lately in the English capital. And one may judge from the metropolis a fortiori to the country, on the like principle as from the aristocracy to the multitude. But who is not aware that London has, down to recent times, been periodically thrown into a nursery commotion, by such ghost scenes as Lord Lyttleton's, the Cock-lane, the Soper-lane ; whereas the fairies and even the witches had been laughed at for centuries. The explanation of this contrast can alone be that now furnished, namely, that the apparitions are congenial to the race. And this solution allays the wonder at such believers in them as Johnson, without imputing a special crack to the most vigorous of English intellects. JSTor is the inference suggested from the capital left to conjecture. In fact, Addison who, in the Spec- tator, recurs so much to ghosts, declares expressly that there was not in his day a town or village in the compass of England that was not supposed " haunted." It is notorious that English sailors are so subject to this illusion, that the fact was long considered to be an effect of scurvy, until the scurvy found a remedy, and the ghost-seeing survived it. With the Germans, too, no doubt it has been always still more rife in the popular superstitions than in the visions of 342 SUPEKNATUEAL MACHINEKY OF SHAKESPEARE. the educated. There besides is a sort of demons in their so- called mythology, of which the name and nature are subject to dispute, in consequence of their posterior confusion with the fairies. The allusion is to those beings which the English term elves. But these the writer inclines to think had been originally ghosts. The name in German is halb, almost identical with half, that is, the spiritual moiety surviving in the deceased. 1 In the Scandinavian dialects, the form is alf, which is completely the Cockney pronunciation of half. The poets or traditions have confirmatory combinations. Thus the Edda groups Ghosts, dwarfs, And Dark elves. Whence the term dark, if not to specify a sort of ghosts, in distinction from the white elves, which would be thus the ghosts proper ? Eor the elves conceived in general were never fancied black. The distinction would moreover be only conformable to that which the same people applied to the witches ; the black elves like the black witches would be the ghosts malignant. This in fact is countenanced by Spencer, who sings : Nor elvish ghosts, nor ghastly owls do flee, Bat friendly fairies met with many graces. iShep's Cal. JSTow, this expressly declares that a sort of ghosts were termed elves, and also that the species was deemed to be maleficent. But the passage means much more than has 1 The Rosicrucian elves or sylphs were the spirits of the air, of which tbe ghosts were also supposed to be composed, and from which proceeded likewise the name itself of spirit. But the source of all those Rosicrucian whimsies will appear afterwards. ghosts. 343 been, notified by criticism. It contrasts and characterises our three forms of the preternatural. The " ghastly owls " are the witches, the Striges of the Eomans. The fairies " graceful " and " friendly " are the portion of the Celts. The elves and the ghosts are thus resolved into identity, and " elvish " is an epithet of contradistinction. HoAvever, the establishment of this conjecture is not needed to shew the prevalence 6f ghosts with the popular or primitive Teutons ; the passage just adduced from the Edda, their oldest record, ranks this mode of superstition at the head of their denio- nology. And that this spectral superstition haunts the people to this day, the public journals have just offered a remarkable attestation. It is known that the gallant French general Marceau, who fell by the Austrians at Altenkirchen, has a monument erected to his fame at Coblentz. For some time after the event, his ghost appeared repeatedly to several of the good German people around ; but the fact Avas little noticed, as a thing no doubt quite common, and the apparition ceased Avith the excitement about the General. A few Aveeks ago, however, the sentinel on guard about the hour of midnight in the neighbourhood of the monument, saw approach him a man on horseback in French military costume. Receiving no answer to his challenge, he fired, reloaded and fired, three times. A patrol alarmed by the reports soon arrived, and found the sentry prostrate on the ground in convulsions. He was taken to the hospital in a state of derangement, and raving of nothing but his military A T isitor. iS r ow this is surely what could happen, at the present advanced day, to a soldier of perhaps no other race in Europe. 344 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. Iii fine, at the other extremity of the Gothic family, athwart its centuries of civilization, migration, and even mixture, the phenomenon is found, as if in progress of develop- ment, erected into a sort of institution or new religion. It is known that the Americans have gone so far "a-head" as to have opened direct intercourse with the land itself of ghosts, to visit it at pleasure across a " bi-frost " bridge, and to read daily its events in journals patronised ad hoc; whereas the Teutons of the old hemisphere were restricted to a chance " medium," such as Swedenborg, who was the Marco Polo of this region. There is, no doubt, in these proceedings a large alloy of imposture, that is to say, of commerce, as in the English witches. But imposture must have some capital to work upon in even America. And when it is considered that the Teutons of the Eepublic are, in the mass, beyond the English and even the Germans in intelligence — such intelligence, that is, as forms the specialty of the race — when this distinction is considered, the " spirit " mania of the Americans must go to consummate the demonstration of an organic idiosyncrasy. It does so the more, surely, by excluding all accident, when it is known that the Americans have had the germ from the mother country, and under circumstances so diver- gent, have only given it due development. The English origin may be exemplified, so long ago as Dr. More, in the case above referred to of the Drummer of Taedworth. Among the modes in which this celebrated demon announced his presence were : " the motion of chairs, stools, and bed- staves, nobody being near them ; the beating of drums in the air over the house in clear nights, and nothing visible : GHOSTS. 345 the shaking of the floor and strongest parts of the house," etc., etc. Another form which the noise took in process of time — for it continued several months — was " the gingling of money ;" a variation which will now perhaps be conceived no less natural than was the muscularity of the manifesta- tions. The Americans, however, keep the money in the background ; no doubt, with the general advance in point of cuteness. The more naive as well as learned English divine applies, in this case, the same scrupulous investigation as before noted. He remarks, among other niceties, that " when the noise was loudest, and came with the most sudden and surprising violence, the dogs never seemed to hear or notice it." Beyond doubt the dogs were not of Teutonic breed. As to the supposed agent of all this hub- bub, a poor drummer of the neighbourhood, he was tried " for a witch," and condemned to transportation. But, adds our good Doctor, " he escaped on the voyage, by raising storms and affrighting the sailors." It is remarkable with what modesty the English abandon their clear right to priority in this " rapping science " to the Americans. Its re-establishment among them, -with the gentilitial enginery of meeting and journalism, they treat as transatlantic humbug. But this pretension is no less national than the affection itself. It is thus they treat the failings universally of their great offspring, without seeing that these are merely a clearer transcript of themselves. The pedagogic and patronising lectures of the London press, so often ministered to the Americans on their famous vulgar- isms, were no less needed at home and at the elbow of the critics. The most notorious of those phrases — " I expect," 346 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. " I a'nt," " I guess " — are overheard among the urchins and porters in the very capital, and are no doubt habitual to all classes in the provinces. So, more recently, the filibustering is a topic of English horror, quite forgetting that the Americans do but relapse to the mos majoram. So the " bowie knives " are but a like revival of that Saxon weapon, plied so skil- fully against the Britons at the banquet of Aimsbury. There is a still more curious reminiscence than even these. It is known that the highest eulogy which the Teutons could bestow upon their primitive heroes, was the title of horse : hence the Hengist and Horsa, the Castor and Pollux, made immortal by conducting the Saxons to Britain. In the latter of the names, the etymon is flatly clear ; the other means with somewhat more spirit the Neiglier ; and, had it but concurred with the second of the Doric heroes, would have been a happy antetype of English glory in the "ring." Now, the Americans, with whom the fist has given place to the tongue, are accustomed, we are told by travellers, to salute their favourite orators, upon descend- ing from " the stump" — i. e. the national rostrum — with a pat on the back and the pet compliment of " that's a Tidss." So the character in general, in even the most creeping Yankee, where it may appear the opposite, is in reality quite English. Sidney Smith was enabled by the normal oppo- sition of his semi-Celtic blood as well as wit to note this con- trast. Speaking of the Methodists, to whom he had beside the additional aversion of a " regular" gownsman, he remarks : " Wherever Methodism extends its baneful influence, the character of the English people is instantly changed by it. Boldness and rough honesty are broken down into meanness, GHOSTS. 347 prevarication, and fraud." Now, this is just the transfor- mation that has produced the Yankee. Methodism is Protestantism carried practically to democracy. But the equality of this condition leaves no play to English brow- beating, Avhich is the real spirit of the boldness and rough honesty, and which accordingly reappears in full purity with the Americans, in their aggregate or national demeanour towards foreign states. So, stolidity and arrogance are apt to pass for pride, a vice imputed still more ludicrously, by most foreigners, to the English. The coarseness of this oversight is well exposed in a saying of Curran, who remarked, that " the English have not pride enough to be humble." This, in fact, went to the core of both the character and quality. The humble, the true, the foolish pride — the " proud humility," as Byron, also, was led, by kindred sympathy, to well discern it, — belongs to the countrymen of Curran and their race. With the Teutons the pride is not with poverty but with pelf, and displays itself alike in the pedlar and the prince. Hence it is that even the prince will for this object stoop to peddling. Most the multitude of kinglets through- out Germany have, for centuries, since they ceased to be highwaymen, dabbled in some mode of commerce. The fact is notorious of even the emperors themselves. For example, the Prince Consort of Maria Theresa drove not merely a traffic, but a contraband traffic, and in munitions of war, and against his own wife, and with the freebooting Frederick, who was robbing her of her dominions. The same pride of pelf or profit, or, in general, of success, ii is that causes the obsequiousness to public opinion, which most travellers describe as so degrading in 348 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. the Americans, and which in England has been lately called decline of "individuality." Why, on the contrary, it is simply the old individuality adapting itself vigorously to the altered circumstances. If that writer, who at the same time is for extending still the suffrage, and not merely to all males of maturity, but even to women, would rather turn backwards this tide of growing dependence, would repeal the Eeform Bill, restore the rotten boroughs, re-establish, in a word, the feudal system in its full vigour of insulating all the interests, class or personal, of the community — if Mr. Mill could but do this, by way of remedying the growing subser- viency, he would be acting at least consistently with a teacher of the science of logic. But with a numerous Teutonic and opulent aristocracy, to whom their former coarse distractions are distasteful or denied, and who are thrown at once for prestige and amusement on a Parliament, itself become dependent more or less upon the people, it is absurd to think there could be the same public independence. But the individuality has merely changed its means ; it was the sabre in the middle ages, in the nineteenth century it is syco- phancy. Accordingly, the proudest of these nobles are heard daily to rival the lowest newspapers in be-flattering English prejudices ; ministers themselves indulge a grossness of gasco- nade, which no American demagogue would hazard on his keener public. Of course, these men cannot be conscious of the least self-degradation, and laugh among themselves upon retiring from the hurraing multitude. But this unconscious- ness it is precisely that forms the specialty of the character. They do not feel the thing demeaning, because they find it to be profitable, and that profit or personal interest is their crite- GHOSTS. 349 rion of conduct ; and farther, that they know the test is common to the country, which will judge of them instinc- tively from the same point of view. Thus the standard maintains a certain currency at home, and operates as counterfeit but when imposed on the other races ; and the like is true of these, in their respective moral principles. Nor need this imposition be ascribed to the least conspi- racy, though it has long succeeded quite as well with the English. No people in all history have pushed so far the policy of the fox in the fable, who was docked of his tail ; none has gone so near to passing upon Europe and the world their vices and infirmities for virtues and pre-eminences. But they did so, not by project, but in acting out their nature under circumstances of predominance in politics and purse ; for these things with the multitude are the criterion of all excellence. Accordingly, since those circumstances have begun to change, the self-laudation goes on duping but the English themselves. Their statesmen, the press and its foreign correspondents, speak and write as if they were in a conspiracy against the country ; exaggerating its resources, disparaging its rivals, dissembling or glossing the reverses and the ridicules which break of late, in spite of them, upon its self-complacent somnolence ; and then, again, exciting its ague fits of spleen or fear. This daily jumble of coarse and contradictory adulation suggests indeed the image of the great Times newspaper as playing upon John Bull the tricks of Tubal upon Shylock. Yet in this conduct there is surely no malice prepense : it is simply what Schlegel has so well remarked of Hamlet, in saying that he is "a hypocrite to himself." To this extenuation it would be also 350 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. fair to add the negative apology, of an absence of general principles. For any trace of such, in fact, you would in vain rummage the whole waste of parliamentary and public oratory of England ; the gleaning of its entire history would not equal Burke alone. As for the American, it is the very Sahara of the species. But to return from these temporal attestations of con- currence, between the mother country and the daughter, to our theme of ghosts. There must be consequently no less error in the doctrine now prevailing, which attributes appa- ritions to pathological derangement, than in the earlier notion of their coming from the mystic world. It is merely an error of an opposite kind. !Nb ; the body of a nation is never either mad or morbid, unless so far as these conditions glide insensibly towards health and reason ; for normal states of mind and body range through all points intermediate. "When a phenomenon is liable with or without excitation, to appear with special frequency or intensity in a whole race, the predisposition must have a natural existence in the con- stitution. It is not disease nor derangement, but a defect or an excess ; or both together, for they are correlative in the poising of the organism. To an excess of this description in the Teutonic com- plexion may be demonstrably traced its predisposition to see ghosts. The trait referred to is the now explained indivi- duality of ■the race ; that constitutional introversion of the mind as of the man which gives predominance to conscious- ness over reason and observation. For the mind floats in ideas as the body does in air. Were the internal air abstracted, the body would collapse beneath the vast external pressure, GHOSTS. 351 and life could linger but round the surface : such in fact is the normal state of the vegetable world ; and it is likewise, no less duly, in the vitality of idea, the state of the Roman intellect, now defined as all exterior. If, on the contrary, the vacuum were made on the outside, the enclosed air would tend to dissipate the body into vapour ; and so the personal ideas called sentiments, where uncontrolled by the physical world, must, by a similar necessity, inflate the intel- lect with visions. But this is, too, the normal state of the Teutonic understanding in its social antagonism to the Roman exteriority. Hence, in religion, its protestation of private judgment against tradition, making each individual more wise than all the past ; in philosophy, its hypothetical excogitations instead of logic ; in even mere pragmatism, its missionary pertinacity to propagate its own political institutions as well as interests. It is in short the blind tendency of an unregulated selfishness to the projection, at once real and ideal, into space, of its own faith as reformation, of its polity as liberty, of its commerce as civilization, and its compunctions as ghosts. And what confirms the last case is, that a cardinal condition for beholding apparitions is darkness or night ; for these effect the removal, above supposed, of external objects, and in consequence introvert the mind, in all men, upon self. Dreaming, too, is an example, where the superadded slumber attains a still com- pleter insulation of the interior, and hence is different from ghost-seeing, but in occasion and intensity. The mind, in fact, is in both cases alike engrossed with self ; but in the dreamer a large portion of the facidties are suspended, while in the ghost seer they are all of them awake and excited. 352 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. This affinity, accordingly, has not escaped the divine Shake- speare, who paints the Teutons especially, in the historic plays, as actuated scarcely less by dreams than by ghosts. 6. The Celtic intellect, being a compound of the Eoman and the Teutonic, not so positive as the former, nor so nega- tive as the latter, should be found to be less subject as well to ghosts as witches. And such is accordingly the fact. The Scotch " second-sight," as before noted, is wholly different. Indeed, the difference illustrates the contrast of the races. While the spectres of the Teutons are of persons believed dead, and therefore in a state to rouse the spiritual reaction, the visions of the second-seer are of persons deemed alive, and of whose death the divination could be thus but a sort of sympathy. The two illusions might be designated as extreme effects, the former, of a personal and muscular re- action against perturbing impressions or events of the outer world ; the other, of a social and nervous reaction against conclusions of the reason from unconscious indications. The relation to the physical organism is elucidated in the fact, that while the Highlanders are double seers — a nervous energy, the German people have double goers (doppel- gangers) — a merely muscular one. For this race are so instinctively preoccupied with themselves, and so distrustful of intruders, as to give body to their own shadows. ~Eo doubt, some faith in apparitions has prevailed among the Celts. But it was scarce, it is believed, above the vulgar or the nursery ; cases therefore falling under the law above suggested, the comparative disproportion of exterior know- ledge to interior feelings. Anything beyond this, and it may well be, much of this must have been due to intermixture GHOSTS. 353 with the race of apparitions, and the influence of its literature so instinct with this mystic element. A powerful agency of inoculation was referred to ahove, in Dr. More's correspond- ence with Anglo-Irish countesses, and the great Jeremy Taylor's consistorial court on ghosts. What the poor and " wild " natives saw their masters so engrossed with, they could scarcely have continued unaware of or incredulous. Yet it is curious that in the numher of Irish ghost-seers of all ranks, there is not found, as before stated, a single instance of a native. Perhaps, however, as being papists in aggrava- tion of their " Irishry," their testimony could not be received, even upon oath, in an enquiry conducted with the English solidity, and the inductive rigour exemplified already. At all events, the best of proofs that the notion was not indigenous, is that the Irish took the name from the English term spirit. Nor is the specialty of imagination in the Celts at all at variance. Eor it is not imagination, as is vulgarly assumed, that is concerned in the tendency, but rather the want of it. It has been well remarked that more imagination is required to make a great geometrician than even a poet. And poets themselves are not more liable to see ghosts than other people ; they are infinitely less so than peasants and shep- herds. The horse, a creature of powerful muscularity, but poor fancy, is known notoriously to even anticipate the rider in seeing ghosts : it is another mark of sympathy between the Teutons and this fine animal. But to push the propo- sition up to systematic clearness would require a revisal of the whole field of psychology, and a rescission of the muddy or microscopic metaphysics, that have been another product of the race of subjectivity. To conclude, then, it is the fact of q2 354 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. being thus foreign and factitious that left the spectres of the Celtic populace without the fierceness inspired by faith, just as the Teuton legislation was more tolerant to witches. Even religious excitement could not give to their reformers — Knox or Calvin — the power of most the German brethren of seeing the devil. The Celts moreover gave the ghosts, as it was seen they did the witches, an inclination towards the manners of their own appropriate creation. This creation of Celtic sympathy was stated to be the FAIKIES. 7. In fact, the fairy is a syncretism of the witch and the ghost ; not wholly human like the former, nor wholly spec-* tral like the latter ; not concocting intrigues, poisons, assassi- nations, like the Avitches and the race that gave the witches - their European character ; nor prowling, sulky and solitary, to keep watch of some hidden treasure, or disclose it to a longing kinsman, like the ghost and its creators. The fairies were conceived of a peculiar flesh and blood, a caro non- Adamica, as Paracelsus described the sylphs, with the negative definition habitual to his race. They are beautiful and playful, and indefinitely young. Indeed, the last would seem the attribute explanatory of their nature, for their country is named in Irish the Land of Youth or of. the Young. 1 They do not hurt if let alone ; but if provoked, will avenge terribly ; not unlike the national emblem of Scotland, the thistle, they are surly as the prickles or soft as 1 Tir na vC oge. This, however, would appear to he a popular con- fusion with the paradise of the heathen Irish. But the argument remains, as the things concur at hottom. FAIRIES. 355 the down. So gentle are they and fond of flattery, that a mere compliment will propitiate them. Whence the care of the Irish peasantry to treat them with all politeness, and never style them but as " gentlemen," " good people," " men of peace"; as the "Welsh also call them "fair people," in flattery of their beauty. They are, moreover, of praeternatu- ral intelligence and skill, and are so in their own right, not through the powers of Earth or Satan. They sometimes interfere in the business of mankind, to vindicate the wrongs of the friendless and helpless. So regardful are they held to be of the economy of their own community and the perfec- tion, both corporeal and mental, of the members, that any .mortal of more than ordinary intellect, stature, beauty, is in danger of being filched away, and sometimes replaced by a cripple. This abortion or pining creature which they thus palm upon the human neighbours, instead of killing it like the ancients, is by the Irish termed siabhra. 1 And the purport 1 Crofton Croker, as a native, is scarce to be excused when he falls into the blundering of English writers upon Irish manners. But perchance to have been strict would savour too much of the soil, and compromise him with the cockney patrons of his "snobbish" class of Irishmen. However, he makes the shefro (as he spells it) a distinct species, instead of merely an abnormal deviation from the type. It is true the people call it in English a fairy simply ; but it is because no mark of distinction would be requisite, as this was the sole fairy that dwelt familiarly with men. Accordingly the name is used in this sense reproachfully, when children stigmatise a sickly playmate as " you fairy." Moreover, the picturesque precision of the Erse could not have failed to note the pathological aberration. In the Dictionary of O'Reilly, besides the term siabhra, there are given in their places sia and sighe as meaning fairy. The author intimates no difference between the three words — with that primitive default of the critical spirit which marks the country. 356 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. of getting rid of it in this more civilized or humane manner is still the Spartan one of beautifying the "breed of the community. For while the mother in other races is most attached to her feeblest offspring, the Irish mother tends to spurn it as if it could be no child of hers. In fine, the form of the fairy commonwealth is neither popular nor oligarchical ; it is monarchical, but directed by an aristocracy of " capacities." And that the monarch should have been, not a king, but a queen, is assuredly a curious comment on the doctrine now established, of the mental and social eminence of the sex in this race, and thus might suffice of itself to prove the fairies of Celtic origin. In fact, these beings, in constitution, habits, sentiments, aspirations, are such precisely as should result from the dis- tinctions of the Celtic race — -a race of order, generosity, sociability, art, intelligence. Accordingly the fairies are its creatures and its counterpart. They filled, in France, the mediaeval romances with the name oi f eerie ; a word of which the collectivity characterizes their sociability, and which is even untranslatable in the idioms of the personal race. The other elegant and social qualities are also typified no less significantly in the title chevaliers-fees, which crowned the heroes of knight-errantry. In Spain, the classic land of chivalry, the fairies were so potent that the Romish Inquisi- tion set to crush them with the heretics : for they were alien to the Eomans, as the witches to the Celts. But Ireland is But though the terms sia and sighe may ^differ only in orthography, the compound element in siVbhra must assuredly have a meaning. May it not have heen added by onomatopeia, and be analogous, if not the origin, of the English term shivering ? FAIRIES. 357 the fairy, as the Celtic, land by eminence. The various traits above enumerated appertain to the Irish fairies. These were naturally less theatrical and warlike than the French variety, having been provincialized and even pariahed, like the people. There may be added the two circumstances noted by Spencer, who got his notion (such as it was) of the fairies in Ireland. He contrasts them, it is remembered, as friendly and graceful with the elvish ghosts of the Teutons and the ghastly witches of the Eomans. The Irish section offers also certain curious attestations of the intermediate character above assigned the fairies. To produce the mixed condition of humanity and spirituality, the Irish possibly confound these beings, in the night of early ages, with the traditional aborigines of the island, called TuntJta das Dennaa. No such people of flesh and blood has in reality existed, if a late official antiquary of Ireland might be trusted. 1 This author interprets the name itself to mean : " The race of people or spirits who know evil or destiny." The present writer cannot vouch for the philology of the conjecture, and still less can he assent to the disposal of the Dennans. But nothing could, however — though the anti- quary fails to note it — be more presumptive of a myth of Celtic fabric than the idea of destiny. It is also to be owned that the Dennans are so regarded — that is to say, as fairies , — in Macpherson's poems of Ossian ; a concurrence which had scarce befallen, by-the-bye, to a wholesale forger. More- over, these " spirits who know evil or destiny" would evi- dently be of the identical nature now assigned to the fairy or 1 Sir William Betlaam, "Ulster King-at-Arms." Etruria — Celtica, vol. i. p. 14. 358 SUPERNATURAL MACHINEEY OF SHAKESPEARE weird sisters of Macbeth — " the spirits that know all mortal consequences." Thus the origin of the fairies, instead of being referred, as in the witches, to the physical, or in the ghosts, to the spiritual world, would be semi-etherialized without destroying the rational basis, by being relegated to the mystery of primeval history. The combination thus accom- plished under favour of the veil of time is more distinctly reproduced in tbe position of their place of dwelling. For while the ghost dwelt under ground, and the witch above it or in the air, the fairies occupied a middle site, beneath the surface but of raised grounds ; such as in hills presenting caverns or in the raths that bestrew Ireland. ; The Scotch and Welsh should yield alone to the Irish in fairy phantasy. The Scottish fairies, it has been noted, were much connected with the witches ; but in quality of princi- pals and as imparting them their powers. The predominance attests the native and superior production ; as the Teutons gave the honour, for the same reason, to the prince, of ghosts. Another trait of this variety is a disposition to contro- versy, more especially on theological and moral subtilizings. It must be needless to note the source of this proclivity in the Scotch fairies. Their Irish brethren likewise shew it, though less coherently, from lower culture. The Scotch had also a quite peculiar description of household fairy, which did the drudgery of the kitchen, and without asking or ? accepting hire, but, on the contrary, would, if offered it, have quit the family for ever. There was something of the national economy in this, no doubt. But the delicate disin- terestedness is quintessentially Celtic, and if found among the Red Indians, would prove them somehow of this race. 359 The Brownie is a creature almost as exquisite as the Ban-shi — if indeed anything could well approach this most ethereal impersonation of the cpieen of the humanities, Fidelity in misfortune. Compare the Brownie with the English analogue called Puck or Eobin-goodfellow ; who must be regularly fed and paid, as well announced in the name "Zm/fy-beggar," which is given him by Reginald Scot. 1 Indeed the fairies, 1 These very names of Puck and Brownie illustrate the general posi- tion. The latter is a sample of the universal form in which the Scotch dialect softened down the rugged Saxon, by diminutives of termination, bespeaking tenderness as well as ear. Who has not felt with what a charm this affectionate peculiarity befringes, so to speak, the manly poetry of Burns ? It is its prevalence in proper names that procured for the Scotch the English soubriquet of "Jaimie.'' With the English themselves, it is Jem, Jack, Dick, Bill, Moll ; as with Shakespeare in depicting them, it is Puck, Snug, Hal; and Carl, Ered, Hans, with the continental brethren. Not a trace of those fondling or delicate modulations in the dialect of any really Teutonic people. On the contrary, the Irish concur with the Scotch ; and both the contrast and agreement are curiously preserved in the by-names of the three nations : Padtfy, Saw?iev/, and John Bull. The traits are palpably ema- nations from the nervous and the muscular temperaments. But how came these things, since the Highlands had no hand in the Scotch dialect, which was wholly and exclusively a product of the Lowlanders? How did these Anglo-Saxons make a systematic change in the language of their brethren across the Tweed or Border, and make it to concur with the " Irish enemy" across the Channel? Nor could there be a deeper criterion of race, unless it be the kindred particular of music ; in whose very scale, accordingly, the same Saxon Lowlanders are found again conformable to the Irish and the Highlanders, and utterly contrasted with the English and the Teutons generally ! The trading literateurs will, however, not be barred by facts of this kind from re-echoing a progeniture that pays. Nor can their honest industry do henceforth serious harm. When they attempt to argue, they betray themselves to truth. A curious example appeared recently 360 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. by another characteristic trait, were fancied not to eat of coarse mortal food at all. Shakespeare did not fail to observe the refinement. Imogen, when she is found in possession of the cave, is imagined by Bolario, like a true Celt, to be a "fairy": in a Scotch monthly. The writer is reviewing the ballad-poetry of Ireland and Scotland ; and he thence takes occasion to contrast the complete harmony of the pretended two races in the latter of the countries, with the continued animosity of the Irish to the Anglo- Normans. His'proof of the Scotch fusion is the unity of the popular poetry ; nor could he have a better. Only that he starts upon a fallacy of assumption, namely, that a second race had existed in the case ; and then besides inverts the import of the unity as a fact, for it has never once prevailed among a people of different races ; and he does both, with the contradictory case of Ireland in his hands, where the diver- gency of race persists, as usual, in the poetry. In plainer terms, the prin- ciple or recognized law was, that unity of popular poetry implies identity of race; and then, if it should be supposed, in any special case, to have proceeded also from a "fusion" of races, the existence of this source should first be proved as a fact, and all the more that it contradicts the principle in terms. The magazine logician reverses the order, sets the "minor'' at the head, and makes the "major" its humble servant. Another of his proofs is the greater animosity of the Lowlanders towards the " Gael" in the days of plunder than- towards the English. It is, be argues, that the Saxon plunderers were felt to be brethren, while tbe Highlanders were hated as being strangers to boot. Now there are cer- tainly in Scotland not many old women who could not here correct him in logic or philosophy. It is the virulence of family enmities, not of the alien, that is proverbial ; and so the facts are again conclusive to quite the contrary of his pm^pose. The Scotch people without distinction, although they nationally never hurted them, have been more hated by tbe Irish than the English themselves, and because of their subserving "the stranger" in oppressing them. From the English they expected nothing better than outrage ; the animosity arose, as always, from disappointed claims and confidence. 361 But that it eats our victuals, I should think Here were a fairy. The same poet makes tlie bodiless but Teuton gbost, in Hamlet, describe it as an aggravation of the fires of hell to have to fast. But to return to the Scotch, another specialty is the ourisk ; a sly and melancholy being who, to the reverse of the Brownie, is bent but on doing mischief, and in the manner of disordering. This is the conception of a people of methodic intellect, the people who imagined a fatal order in the universe ; not the race who sought a providence to shape for them their rough-hewn ends 1 The ourisk is, it ' seems, accordingly, the subject of a story much resembling the device by which Ulysses tricked the Cyclops ; for by such means he might be turned from his mischief to utility. While this sort of Highland sphynx is thus subdued by means of intellect, the Teutons have a similar demon, who is an armourer, an arranger (by a like succedaneum to their genius of disorder), and who can also, to the contrary, be won to work but by plain club-law. Walter Scott, who has compared them, gives the latter the enlightened prefer- ence of setting muscular compulsion above mental emulation. The ancient Gauls, when they began to get out of barbarism, used to dye their hair red, and erect it into a top-knot to imitate the fierce and savage aspect of the Germans ; the kindred of the Gauls continue even to this day to deck and daub themselves, with much the same discerning admiration. But the ourisk cannot be properly considered as a fairy ; nor even the Brownie, whose dwarfish stature savours like- wise of a Northern influence. R 362 SUPEENATUEAL MACHINEEY OF SHAKESPEARE. 8. As with the witches and the ghosts, so there were fairies before the Celts ; but it was in a widely different and rudimental state. The Peris of the Persians are supposed to be their prototypes. D'Herbelot, however, thinks the French name fees to be rather from the Italian fate, and to refer to destiny ; and this in point of function would tally well enough with the account of the Dennans, as with the Celtic notion generally. But at all events the English name of fairy is from the French. On the other hand, the Irish appellation is quite indigenous, and has, moreover, as seen above, that variety of forms which is among the surest marks of native production. It was the English who had occasion to borrow the name here, as the Irish had to borrow the Anglo-Latin spirit. It is a refined attestation of the respec- tive origins. Accordingly, the faith in fairies among the Teutons and the Italians was as faint or as factitious as predicted by the principles. Ariosto, who exhausted the supernatural as far as known to him, makes no mention of these beings, at least in any proper sense ; for the Eate Morgane were totally different. No doubt, the first collection of fairy-tales ap- peared in Italy. But this implies that they were foreign, not the contrary, as is assumed.- Such fictions provoke curiosity but where they are not native, and even speculation is first excited by the unfamiliar. It is in Europe, not Arabia, that the Thousand-and-one Nights have been collec- tively first published and always read with most avidity. So in Britain, fairy tales or dissertations are not written for the Scotch or the Irish, who better know this lore themselves ; the main market they are meant for is the English clowns j FAIRIES. 363 and cockneys, who have heard the name of fairies, "but never seen them in fact or fancy. Indeed, the English source of fairy lore was such as the Italian ; it was brought in by the writers, not a product of the people. Even the author first to mention them appears to be Chaucer. And he does so from the midst of the fourteenth century in this wise : All was this land fulfilled of faerie ; The Elf-queen with her jolly company, Danced fall oft in many a green mead. This was the old opinion, as /rede ; I speak of many hundred years ago : But now can no man see no elves mo. "Wife op Bath. The poet must have meant no Englishman ; for Welsh, Scotch, and Irish were accustomed to see the sort of elves in question for centuries after. The case is, that the Teutons never saw them at all. They took them upon hearsay from their Celtic neighbours, and distorted them, like most the rest that passed from the same source through the camera obscura of their fancy, into elves. Accordingly, the period referred to by Chaucer is expressly the British era of King Arthur ; and the word faerie, which he must borrow, is written raw from the French form. Both the facts imply conclusively that the fairy superstition had never any root in the mass of the English people. Chaucer himself is so ignorant therein as not alone to travesty the fairies into Gothic elves, but even to speak of " Pluto that is King of fayerie," and " Proser- pine and all her fayerie." This grotescpie jumble, however, is full of significance. It suggests, in the first place, that Chaucer had his notion respecting the fairies at third hand 364 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. through, the Italians. ISTor is the thing improhable on general grounds. English literature in its infancy copied everything from the Italian, and so continued to do, says Warton, even down to the age of Elizabeth ; while, on the other hand, it would not then, any more than at the present, condescend to copy anything directly from the "Welsh or Irish. The consequence was, that while the Welsh romances supplied to the Italians the raw material of imagination, the manufactured article was counterfeited by the English, with- out or with a knowledge of the fountain at their elbow : by this circuit came the fairies with their classical accretion. And perchance, in the second place, the latter ingredient was also used with distinct purpose in this juncture by the English poet ; for the Teutons would as naturally conceive the fairies, as they had done the witches, to be subject to the Devil, and Pluto and Proserpine were the classical equivalent. With Chaucer commenced likewise the home confusion with the elves ; while Spencer has afterwards, it has been seen, contrasted them. Yet Spencer, too, conceived the fairies with the crudeness of a foreigner, if not perhaps with also the circumspection of a courtier. Having got his direct knowledge of the subject in Ireland, he would, for the reasons mentioned, be led to mask or to distort it. An able critic was thus right in saying the title of his poem is " the grossest misnomer in either romance or history." Yet the fairies, as far as treated, are conceived less incorrectly than by any English writer before him or perhaps after. Emphatically so is the feature of the title, which gave them a " Queen," in due conformity with the Celts. A Teuton drawing from his own notions would FAIRIES. 365 infallibly have made it King. Nor is this gentilitial prefer- ence abandoned to conjecture. It has just been seen that Chaucer had made Pluto "King of fayerie" ; and long later, the German Wieland gave this primacy to " Oberon," the hero of a quaint but most characteristic poem, in which fairies, elves, sylphs, and in short all things fantastical, are danced through all the mazes of Teutonical confusion. Spencer, it is true, had likewise introduced Oberon ; but it was duly in the no less gentilitial cpiality of Prince Consort. Accordingly, this poet represents the Fairy Queen as herself holding public festivals to hear complaints and redress injuries — a conduct well evincing her both sovereign and Celtic. In fine, the object proposed to the human hero of the poem is Gloriana, that is, glory, the ambition of the Celts ; and this hero is no less genuine a Celt than King Arthur. But here commences the Teutonic and foreign amalgama- tion ; foreign, that is to say, in the sources of the poet, who took the story of King Arthur from Italian or French romances. His original amalgamations are, however, still coarser. They consist of an eponimous genesis of the fairies, imagined at the same time to disguise his Irish sources and to flatter the acquisitive propensions of the English. He derives them, like a true nominalist, on the one part from Pay, and on the other or Teutonic, from a male sprite called Elf. Here is then a naive claim of the Teutons to the fairies — which, however, is allowed them, with the usual Prench carelessness, by even such a work as Michaud"s History of the Crusades. It reminds one of the claim they also laid to the Lowland Scotch, from some Norman adven- turer, and often but the mere name, having crept into a 366 SUPEENATUEAL MACHINEEY OF SHAKESPEAEE. family, and thence "begot the whole clan. With the dif- ference, however, that the clan denomination is inadvertently left by Spencer to follow the mother ; while the father is again but the usual Prince Consort. For to this people a race of beings without a father to beget them, any more than a Queen without a " consort," was inconceivable. But what they could not even conceive they had no part in creating. The points remarked lie, on the contrary, in the gentilitial character, both mental and political, of the Celts as drawn by Shakespeare. The fairies they imagined without begin- ning as without end, that is, as pure abstractions of relation and reason ; and this because the Celtic intellect itself, which created them, is founded upon neither of the two material factors, namely nature and man, but on the common laws of both. So the Celts were first, in religion, to view the soul as an essence, and give to it the circular migration of immortality. So, in politics, the female monarchy imports not only the Celtic eminence above established of the sex, which is indeed a strict concomitant ; but chiefly that it suits the aristocracy of intellect which is the destination, as the yearning, of this race. For what the intellect instinctively detests and shuns the most is the obstruction of a brutal and self-willed muscularity ; and this is typified by man in com- parison with woman. The latter has the softness, the ductility, the grace that fit her for the sole requisite in such a government, a badge of unity. Hence the Celts have not alone assigned a Queen to their fairy polity, but have been always so inclined, as has been shewn, in their real history. So with their tendency to aristocracy, in the proper sense of mind or merit. This is primitively and rudimentally repre- FAIRIES. 367 sonted by the priesthood, which has always had, accordingly, a special influence with this race. The Druids had been everywhere their rulers, in the woods. The Boinan clergy still continue a predominant power in Spain. They represent in Ireland what is left to the people — their misery, their disaffection, their hopes, their nationality ; and should they fail in faith to these, they would go the way of the Druids. What confirms still more pointedly the law is the case of Scot- land, where the clergy are, far more really than the British Parliament, the rulers. But if the Scotch are better educated, so are likewise their priesthood ; who above all possess that stringent and compact organization which in France is now advanced into the body of the state, and through whose mental electricity the race will one day rule the globe. A counter-proof is, that the Teutons, upon breaking from their Bomish leading strings, fell over into" the muscular aristocracy of war and wealth. And hence, in England, the necessity of " the Church by law established," understanding by established, of course, wealthily endowed. Tor were the clergy left dependent for support upon this people, they would forthwith all collapse into Methodists or match-makers ; the native prophetism would replace the foreign priest- hood, and consistently where each man is his own priest and pope. To attach to them some reverence, they must be decked with wealth, like the lay aristocracy, who are respected on the same ground. In both, the right to rule or reverence must be made manifest by physical signatures, for want of faculty in the people to appreciate them abstractly ; and though the Lords, whether clerical or lay, should all be noodles, the broad lands and splendid dwellings uphold the 368 SUPEENATUEAL MACHINEEY OF SHAKESPEAEE. national veneration. Such is the true raison d'etre and excuse of these things in England. On the contrary, the Celts, who do not need these mental props, have never any- where endured them when they were their own masters. They put not only their chiefs and governors, hut even the land into circulation ; and thus adjusted them to each other on the principle of merit. It was the chief occasion of their factions and subjection. For the other condition was more suitable to rude ages, and for the same reason that it is normal in a ruder race. 1 But organization was inflexible, and must have paid the tax of the superior destination for which nature had prepared it ; and so the " factions " of the Gauls had subjected them successively to Eomans and to Teutons for a long tract of centuries, to be repaid by their actual position of armed umpire between these races ; and so the murders and usurpations of the Irish and the Scotch kings — of which Macbeth was an example — exposed those peoples to a like fate, but which will equally have in time, no doubt, its end and compensation. It was, in fine, this noble sentiment of cletur digniori that the lineal predecessors of the Celts in social progress embodied in the term itself of aristo- cracy ; and as the Celts reduced the element of force in the government to its minimum expression in the person of a female, so the Greeks of glorious Athens took for their patroness a goddess, and still more explicitly, the goddess of the intellect. 1 This conformity is the secret of the superiority which has every- where marked the Gothic aristocracy above the Celtic. Compare the tenacity of the English and the German, with the French, who were brushed away like gossamer by the Kevolution, and with the Irish as far as native, and even with the Scotch. 369 Not only did his Irish residence not open Spencer to seize these characters, but long later the most intelligent per- haps of English critics, the learned "VVarton, shews the national proficiency in fairy history. "As to Spencer's original and genealogy of the fairy nation (says he), I am inclined to conjecture that part of it was supplied "by his own inexhaustible imagination, and part from some fabulous history." 1 However, under favour of the Gothic alliance aforesaid, and its due consequence of making the affiliated fairies a conquering, colonising, and all but a commercial people, the poem of Spencer had the effect of obtaining for these beings a species of naturalization with the English multitude, besides bringing them into fashion with the Elf- Queen on the throne. Shakespeare, like a shrewd playwright, took this cue of the court and crowd, and prepared them The Midsummer Night's Dream. He drew upon his Celtic sympathies and reminiscences for the fairies, — transferring them from Irish vicinage, and for the magic of distance, to the other end of Europe on the classic iEgean Sea ; drew upon his direct English observation for the " mechanicals," Snug, Bottom, etc., whose very names announce the soil, and upon Spencer or others for the kindred Puck and Oberon ; drew, in fine, upon his waifs of classic reading in translation for the genteel class of people that compose the third action ; and thus exhi- bited in what is still so crudely deemed a mere fancy-piece, a precise image of the three contemporary elements of civi- lization ; the Graeco-Roman, — royal, amatory, elegant and festive, -placed in proper line of history as the frame or 1 On the Fairy Queen, p. 77. 370 SUPEENATUEAL MACHINEEY OF SHAKESPEAEE. foundation ; the Teutonic — rude, mechanical, grasping, arro- gant, " go-ahead" ; the Celtic, with its fairy agencies of intellect and polity conducting mystically those antagonists to the great European unity. It was only since this drama that the English could see fairies, on the hills and vales and meadows of theatrical perspective. A curious token of the genuine or Celtic source of Shake- speare's fairies is, that he dates the action of the Midsummer Night's Dream, as the title itself declares, upon St. John's Eve, still a festival of fairy and fire worship with the Irish. So did, also, this true origin not escape the poet Collins, who loved Shakespeare and Scotland with a truely Celtic sympathy. He sings, in his fine " Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands" : Tliere, Shakespeare's self, with every garland crowned, Flew to those fairy climes his fancy sheen, In musing hour ; his wayward sisters found, And with their terrors drest the magic [tragic ?] scene. From them he sung, when, 'mid his bold design, Before the Scot, afflicted and aghast, The shadowy kings of Banquo's fated line Through the dark cave in gleaming pageant past. Thus not only is Shakespeare's fairy lore referred to the Highlands, but also the Weird sisters are connected, if not classed as fairies, in curious concurrence with the doctrine now established. And what seems still more curious, the term weird itself is found expanded into " wayward," meaning watchers of the way ; as it has been for the first time expounded in this volume. And on all these points no sanction could be higher than that of Collins, who combined with his too exquisitely Celtic FAIRIES. 371 organization an erudition, both romantic and classic, scarce less exquisite. Another point of confirmation in the action of Shake- speare's piece, is the quarrel of the Teuton Oberon with his Celtic spouse, the Fairy Queen, who gentilitially retrudes him to his place of Prince Consort, and insists upon being wearer of the breeches as well as crown. Also the occasion of the quarrel, which is a changeling. How large a part this kidnapping of. young or gifted humanity is held to play in the economy of the Irish fairies was seen above ; with also its social reason of improving their people. To this may be now added the logical reason of vindicating the con- sistency of our providence or of nature, from the shocking incongruity of blasting its own handiwork, in the morning of their bloom, by decrepitude or death. This naive etiology pervades the fairy-creed of Ireland. To these powers are referred all things which the peasantry cannot account for — the raths, the mountain caverns, the primeval des Dennans. Even a hawthorn bush, or other shrub or tree whatever, of a species seen habitually to grow in dumps or masses, will, if isolated, and aloof from the demesne of the landlord, pass infallibly for being protected, planted, haunted by the fairies. For without the protection, it had been cut for fuel ; and without the plantation, how had it sprung alone ; and as for human plantation (apart from the landlord), the natives never heard of any one of their own people so incautious as to plant anything of more duration than potatoe stalks. Thus by its mere strangeness, an exceptional phenomenon Avill flash upon the Celtic imagination this complex reasoning, resulting in the popular causation of the fairies. So Macbeth is represented, 372 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. as remarked upon the subject, to be startled, not with even the apparition of the ghost, hut with the strangeness of the consequences, or the circumstances that attended it. It is, once more, that the Celtic intellect, whether reasoning or imagining, can never rest upon the fact, nay has a positive aversion to it, and floats off to the causes, the consequences, the relations. To the Teuton, on the contrary, the facts are all and sufficient. A peasantry of this people would dwell in Stonehenge or Carnac, without ever eyen adverting to a cause for the strange ruins. They would to them he hare physical objects or facts of no more mystery or meaning than any others round them, because of no concern, unless they in- commoded them. In this case, they would call in that expedi- tious agency, in which the race impersonates all that thwarts it, the Devil. 1 1 The Saxons, in even their heathen days, paid worship to this per- sonage, and what is more, paid it in the form of human sacrifices, as is proved by the official evidence of a prohibitory law : Si quis Iwminem Diabolo sacrificaverit, et in hostiam, more paganorum, demonibus obtu- lerit, etc., says a Capitulary of Charlemagne (Lee. pag. Saxonibus. 9). The Germans have made Europe resound with the name " Arian," as gentilitial title of their great Persian progenitors ; and they explain it to mean royal, noble, warlike, or, in short, every excellence their readers may imagine. It is curious that, in ransacking the whole line of march for homophonous coincidences with this sacred name, they should appear to overlook a very real one at the fountain head. The word Arrian is quite express in the name Arri-meaaes, which was given by the Persian mythology to its devil ; and by this devil the true Persians, the creators of the mythology, the followers of Ormudz, the fellow-Parsees of the ancient Celts, meant originally to impersonate the hordes of savage mountaineers (that is, literally, Arimans), who overran them as a soldier race. The Teutons are quite welcome to this title to their Persian origin, which, unlike their own etymologies, is backed by character and history. FAIKIES. 373 What accordingly was their theory respecting the change- lings ! It is stated by their highest authority, Martin Luther himself. He tells us, in his Table-Talk, that " not only are changehngs the work of the devil, but that he begets others": meaning, doubtless, other children and not other changehngs, since even Satan cannot do things contradictory in terms. The changelings, he proceeds, " are called of the Saxons kill-crops." It is a metaphor no less characteristic of the race, than the logical and social conceptions are of the Celts ; and, accordingly, the Americans, remote from Euro- pean influence, speak of "raising" a crop of children, just the same as a crop of corn : for the American is but the Englishman left to run a little wild, and differs even in physique but much as stock-fish does from cod. Luther closes no less duly with a biblical citation, in lieu of all profane theorising or logic : — " For, as Saint Paul saith, the devil is strong by the child of unbelief." If it were not presumptuous, it might be surmised that the Apostle should have rather said the child of belief. And the example of the great reformer would not discounte- nance the reading. This recalls another token of the heterogeniety of the fairy population to the Teutonic race ; it is that they resisted the Eeformation, and kept good Catholics. An English ballad by a bishop says or sings, with exultation, that the new religion had extirpated the fairies, " whose songs were Ave Maries, and dances were processions." Thus the English Protestantism and the Eomish Inquisition were here too in concert in proscribing the fairies, as " aliens in religion, in blood and in country," though the fairies were 374 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. the natives, and their proscribers the usurpers. This aver- sion, however, did not hinder the Teutons from turning the fairies, like the witches, to account ; as for instance, to " put sixpences into the shoe of the tidy housewives." On the con- tinent,- they travestied them into still lower company, con- founded them with their own brood of dwarfs, gnomes, goblins ; made them wealthy, drudging, dirty, with a colliery for fairy-land : whereas the Celts conceived them normally as gay, splendid, happy, gracious ; holding council on breezy knolls and verdant lawns amid sylvan beauties, and so un- business-UJce, that even their money was a proverb of unreality. In the properly Teutonic superstitions just alluded to, the names supply the usual illustration of the origin. The goblins are suggested to have this title from the Gliibelhnes, the great political faction of the Germans in the middle ages ; as its antagonist the Guelphs are said to give the name of Elves. Although this might contravene the new origin assigned the latter, it is owned that the conjecture is not without pro- bability. The Gothic race were never fertile in devising new names, nor consequently nice about appropriating old ones. When, therefore, those two factions, who were the type and vanguard of the renascent struggle of the Roman and Teuton races, and who through party rage and calumny had left to one another a celebrity that in those ages fell scarce short of the demoniac — when these parties disappeared and left the names ill-understood, the latter might receive a superstitious connotation, as the Irish may have blended the Dennans with the fairies. But such an origin of the name would not make the elves less ghosts, or the goblins to be other than a species of the dwarfs. As to these dwarfs themselves, the name FAIRIES. 375 (dwerger) is purely Gothic ; and accordingly in nature also, they Avere the sort of fairies (if an analogy can be admitted) which is appropriate to this race. It may be useful once for all to fix the species of these beings, and put, if possible, an end to crude confusion of them with the fairies. To confine the explanation to the races in question, their conception of phenomena, in superstition as in science, must have taken, respectively, the following characters and con- trasts. By the Eornano-Italians they were viewed as effects merely ; by the Teutons, on the contrary, exclusively as causes ; by the Celts, as relations between the causes and effects. These varieties of view axe the necessary result of the temperament or tissue predominant in each : in the Italian, the cellular, which is passive, receptive ; in the Teuton, the muscular, which is active, aggressive ; and in the Celt, the nervous, which is rational and regulative. The three gradations are named most familiarly : Powers, Persons, and Principles. They have all been exemplified at large in the present volume. A prime instance of the first was the augury ot the Eomans ; for this proceeded on the notion that mere appearances or facts of nature possessed the power of influencing the fortunes of humanity. The thing advanced in the Italians, with their spiritual development, to the latency of mystic virtues, or, as the phrase was, " occult qualities." It was shewn how finely Shakespeare exhibits this in Friar LaAvrence : ! mickle is the powerful grace that lies In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities. ***** Within the slender rind of this weak flower, Poison hath residence and medicine power. 376 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. It should be also noted with what exquisite propriety the churchman is made to add the appellation of " grace." For this, in truth, is the same notion, advanced to theology. Accordingly the divine grace has always been, with the Italians, an objective present from the Deity, received pas- sively ; with the Teutons as with the Jesuits, it is subjective, personal, derived immediately by each one from his own acts of will ; with the Celts, it is relational, resultant from those extreme contraries, the fruit of a concurrence of the will of man with the will of God. Hence the three divisions of polemics on this subject, made so famous by the names of, Necessary, Sufficient, and Efficacious. And the torrents not alone of ink but of human tears and blood that have been shed in the contention of these views with one another — and shed on the assumption that they were options of volition, instead of being necessities of organization — suggest a melan- choly comment on the history of the intellect in all its other walks, without exception, to this day. But to return to the primitive conceptions of physical nature, the Teutons, in turn, regarded its phenomena as pro- duced, not by virtues or powers, but by persons. The open or mechanical and irresistible they gave to giants ; the latent, whether chemical or organic, to dwarfs. The latter were an effort to conceive, in such phenomena, the seeming disproportion between effect and cause, by minimizing the mass, for want of power for pure abstraction. Accordingly the diminution went on in double ratio of the complexity of the subject and the culture of the Teutons, until it rarefied to the sylphs and salamanders of the Eosicrucians, and finally evaporated into elves or ghosts, which were the supreme term FAIRIES. 377 of this series of superstition. And what confirms all this is, that the same organic law pursues the race, as before noted, into philosophy and their highest geniuses. For the corpuscles of Newton and the monads of Leibnitz — contain- ing, as the latter of the designations specifies, all the properties of nature in the individuals severally, and produc- ing by their combination but the bare interchange of mutual plunder — these atoms and monads of those eminent philoso- phers are but a refined form of the dwarfs of their rude ancestors. Accordingly they all have, as remarked, the like properties, and being the elements of things, reflect the interior of the imaginers ; for it is really this complexional introversion upon self that prompts, and fits for, the analysis of foreign bodies also. The Teutons thus endowed with their own sympathies and appetites the forces of the earth, and imper- sonated them as dwarfs. Hence it is that the German section characterize these creatures by the names of Ground-manikins. Stille-volk, Kleine-volk ; that is, silent and little people : all physical attributions, it is to be remarked ; whereas the epithets assigned the fairies by the Irish are all social. This third class of creatures, in fine, denote the Principles — the laws of relation between Nature and Man — upon which has been constructed the supreme system called society. They accordingly are fully abstract, and intermediate in all things, down to even the comparative dimensions of the stature. Equally aloof from the extremes of giant and dwarf, they are curiously conformed to the same harmonic medium which nature herself, through her primeval oscillations, as between mollusks and megalosaurians, attained progres- sively at last in man. But the immediate object of this little B 2 378 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. exposition was to indicate precisely the nature of the dwarfs ; and the order of the sketch, as of the whole dissertation, may also furnish, at the close, a sort of image, even physical, of the undulating march of the law of progression in society, upon which the whole volume has proceeded, though empirically ; each race of the series retaining its relative position, and all propelling the new billow into action and ascendance. The Teutonic dwarfs, moreover, have three distinctive characters : they are solitary in habits, skilled in metals, and rich in gold. In all these, as well as stature, they are contrasted with the fairies. The latter are imagined of the ordinary human size, as far at least as congruous with their elegance and agility ; otherwise the French would have paid an awkward compliment in giving their prime heroes of chivalry the title "fairy." It has been shewn that the fairies live in policied societies, being solitary but by degradation, as in the siablira. They have a horror of mines and a disdain of money, the use they put the latter to being a pro- verbial mockery. No notion could have therefore been well more preposterous than jumbling the fairies with the Scan- dinavian dwarfs. There only was a mixture, and merely geographical, analogous to that of the corresponding races ; and some examples of this state will make the demonstration crucial. The infiltration of the dwarfs or other Teutonic demons into the Celtic countries keeps a ratio to distance. The elves commingled with the fairies in diminishing proportion, through the Shetland, the Orkney Islands, and along the coast of Scotland. Here they dwindled to some two or three stragglers at the utmost. The Brownie, as remarked, was a dwarf in size and solitude ; Lut both these qualities may- have been adaptations to his household functions, and he remained in the moral unequivocally Celtic. The like might be said of the Ourisk despite its mischief, since the mischief was committed by mere wit, not force or fraud. But the Kelpie or water-horse is unmistakeably Scandinavian, at the same time by the form, the habitat, and the rapacity. In Ireland, which was entered by these strangers through the English (the slight and sea-board settlements of the Danes could have left none), the fairies are degraded into dwarfs in the east. Mr. Keightley, in his sprightly yet erudite book on fairies, remarks with wonder that it is only in his native province of Leinster that these beings have been supposed to fall below the human stature. He should have, seen that it was but logical the fairies of the " Pale" should, like their authors, be bastardized by the commixture with the Gothic analogues. 1 The like consistency prevails on the English confines of the Welsh, where the fairies are described, it seems, as " little fair people." More characteris- tic still, the fairy money is here sterling — sterling in the actual sense, as in the primary one, of Easterling. The creole progeny of the English were too good men of business to suffer a depreciated currency upon their border. This particular recalls the sole case of a dwarf in Ireland ; the leprechaun is, besides, solitary and noted for his cash. The name also 1 This writer is absolutely without theory on the subject. Such, it is true, was the case with all before him. But he has the exceptional con- fidence to think that for him it was reserved to close the doctrine of the fairies. Future writers, says he naively, can but contribute mere facts. The foregoing pages are respectfully presented to his notice. 380 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. speaks his origin, being a corruption of the English " lubber- kin." The Irish pooka is a like euphonization of "Puck"; and the character — though modified more deeply than the name, into a gloomy, lubberly, mis-shapen creature, skulking in dark recesses, and guarding usually a hidden treasure — aptly designates the Irish preconception of the English. 1 1 The Highlanders, it seems, have a similar impression. Miss Sinclair somewhere states that, on seeing their moorlands crossed by a person with a tottering or awkward gait, they are wont to exclaim : " There goes an idiot or an Englishman." The notion is quite natural in a Celtic people anywhere, and above all, where the elasticity is heightened by mountain exercise. It is thus that English people are known in Paris at any distance. The German is distinguished by the opposite rigidity, which is the duly kindred extreme of the oscillation. The Gothic trunk is as if either slung or stuck upon the hips. These anatomical peculiarities consort profoundly with tbe theory. For it is the nervous system that gives precision to the movements, and even guidance to the well-pro- portioned growth of the body. Where this archetype is feeble, the dominant muscle forms awkwardly, and shews in every motion the tiraillement of its natural action. Hence the tottering alluded to, which is invariable in imbeciles, as also in the accidental case of intoxi- cation. The Greeks symbolized the contrast in Apollo and Hercules. Such is likewise the explanation of a trait in fact concurrent, the abnormal length of loin that marks the Teuton, as it does the Turk; not the habit of horse-riding, as has been supposed ludicrously : for brutes too present it in the more predacious, as the feline family. In fact, the spinal chord is the region of the nervous tissue appropriate to the muscular system, and must therefore predominate, along with it, the brain. The horsemanship, no doubt, is a concomitant circumstance, and not alone for warfare, but for travel, nay for exercise, A race of this description cannot take it much on foot. Hence the Teutons have never practised games of agility. Even the children play in England but by dragging at each other, or by rolling the body animal fashion along the sward, or by swinging on the iron balustrades of the London parks. For the preponderance of power is towards the arms, as in the quadru- FAIRIES. 3S1 The French have, through the Xorrnans, received the Korrigen of Britanny. These are females always occupied with conihing their flaxen hair ; an assiduity quite in charac- nians; a fact that made the "bowmen'' of England so famous: the energy and embellishment of the legs through the calf — so distinctive of the Celt — is an ulterior and higher development. The confirmation might be pushed through every detail of the body. For example, the prime criterion of the colour of the hair. The English are predominantly still a red-haired people ; a fact that would be suffi- cient to prove their Gothic purity. In general, this fauve or predatory hue of the wild and forest is effaced in man, nay animals, by social or city life ; yet it persists in the vast majority of the population of London. The Chinese, nice observers in superficial matters, denomi- nate the English JFToung-mao-jin, or the Red-hair men ; precisely as the pirate Semites were by the Greeks named Phcenicians. There is also perhaps in the Irish aversion to tbis feature a historical impression as well as gentilitial instinct. Among the peasantry and the children it is an object of reproach, and they couple it with cunning and deceit by the word "foxy." It has undoubtedly some connection with this mental and moral character, as well as with the dominance of the muscular system. The colour, it is true, is found among the Celtic Highlanders ; it seems to have been general with their British predecessors, and was a ground with Tacitus for thinking them Teutons. But the fact] is an exception of the sort that proves the law. Or to speak strictly, it is not at all an exception ; a real law of nature can have none ; what are vul- garly so called are cases varied by new T conditions. The interfering influ- ence was here the locality ; and not so much for the air, as for the modes of life and exercise. Mountaineers develope less the nervous system than the muscular, which was accordingly the other feature alleged by Tacitus in the Caledonians. Of course the multitude of various influences in subjects so complex will forbid to speak with certainty in the case of individuals, though the mark be quite infallible as to a race or nation. Yet even in the former, it is safe to aver that red hair has never covered a brain of first-class power. It may occur, though rarely, in the simpler sorts of genius ; as, for instance, Alfieri, who, besides a poet, was a Picdmontese. 382 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. ter, as lias been shewn, with the Gothic ladies. But what attests still Letter the Teutonic origin is, that they pass tradi- tionally with the Breton peasantry for carrying a "long The like conclusions might he drawn from the Teutonic physiog- nomy, or rather from the lack of what is properly so-called. The English countenance is notoriously not merely the least expressive, hut even the most unsignificant among the children of men. Yet it is, like the hair and other mercantile insignia, such as the skinny lips and fleshy fingers of avarice, as distinctive as the rest, of the modes of mind and character which have conducted England to what she is really. These few closing samples will satisfy the reader that the hody of the work did not exhaust the stock of proofs. The truth is rather that it kept to the mere surface of the subject. It was deemed proper in a volume designed for general readers to dispense as far as possible with all those lines of illustration which, though purely scientific, might give umbrage to the thoughtless. And if these limits have been passed in any particular juncture, the reader may observe that the occasion was of a nature which was likely to encounter a particular recalcitration, and left the author but the alternative of tendering a pretext for being con- sidered ignorant as well as offensive. He must, however, disclaim the insolence, though all hut universal, of affecting to treat the English people with a childish manage- ment. Such an air towards individuals would be the grossest of offences ; and it cannot but be aggravated in proportion towards a nation. It acts as if some vast imposture hung suspended like an avalanche, which a vigorous breath of truth might precipitate upon the country. He knows nothing of this danger, but he is very sure that the common adulation is just the way to accumulate it. Some premonitory fragments have been descending of late years, and if the warning be not taken the ruin may gather into coherence. But where, then, is the fault ? Not in the English people, who are not a mere rabble requiring to be kept in heart by this perpetual inflation ; whose motto, on the contrary, is frankness of pen and speech ; and who assuredly brandish both so freely against others, that they must needs expect the like in even retaliation. Still less can the fault be in the writers of any character ; the very essence of real intellect is conscien- FAIRIES. 383 leathern purse full of money." The human English at this day are thus best known upon the Continent. Another test almost as crucial is, that the Korrigen hate the priests, have a horror of soutans, bells, candles, and the Virgin Mary ; whereas the fairies, on the contrary, were polite votaries of all these objects. Yet the Korrigen and dwarfs were sancti- monious, church-going people. That the fairies were devout but in the social, Celtic sense, and not in the theological or merely sectarian, is proved to demonstration by a famous fact of history. The Albi- genses proper, or people of the Alpine valleys, are proclaimed as having been the precursors of Protestantism. In truth, however, they did not at first protest against the Church ; it was the Church that protested against them and their primitive religion. This religion is well distinguished by M. Michelet as follows : " Deux choses y furent dans une lutte harmonique et douce, d peine perceptible : un Christianism peu theolo- giqe, ignorant si Von veut, innocent comme la nature / et dessous, un element qui ose a peine se produire, le doux genie de la contree, les fees (ou fantines) qui flottent dans lesfleurs innombrables oil dans le brume du matin" x Here is seen the fairy religion underlying the Christian, precisely as ex- pounded at the outset of this discourse, and whose more con- genial rivalry gave umbrage to Eomanism. It was the acrid tiousness and independence. The concoctors of the mischief are the intermediate managers ; the " middle-men " of literature who prey on both alike ; that " dirty, creeping, twining ivy,'' which overspreads them with factitious verdure, while underneath devouring and darkening them to decay, and which may end, in this country, with pushing to extinction all intellect in the authors and all honesty in the public. 1 Histoire de France, torn. viii. p. 34.6. 384 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. sectaries of Protestantism, who in. their incapacity, as now evinced, to comprehend it and in their animosity against the Eomish Church, distorted its true nature for controversial purposes. But what have the Albigenses to do with the Celts 1 Only being a remnant of the ancient Helvetians, and the purest Celts remaining perhaps except the Irish. Accordingly the language had continued almost Erse ; as see the versions of the Lord's Prayer in Chamherlayn's specimens. Here assuredly is a refined proof that the fairies were Celtic. Michelet, with the ordinary ignorance on the subject, com- bined with the French indifference to the antiquities of their own race, ascribes this beautiful creation to the nature of the country. He does not reflect that several other popula- tions, but Itahc or Teutonic, lived amidst the same scenery, without having ever had the slightest trace of the belief. It was peculiar to this spot, which he styles the " Israel of the Alps," with that democratic rhetoric with which he out- rages the French language. Had he only said their Ireland, the metaphor might have a meaning, from the analogy of history as well as fable and blood : the Papal butcher of the Albigenses also was an Englishman. For English religion as well as " liberty " was always cluely Swiss. In fact, the heresy of the Albigenses was but the Celtic Catholi- cism, as broached already in the early Church by their own Vigilantius, 1 by Pelagius the Briton, Celestinus the Irishman, 1 M. Michelet so says, without giving authorities, though the country of Vigilantius is held in general to be unknown. But this is commonly the case with men of celebrity who spring from petty and obscure populations. The mother people have no means of maintaining FAIRIES. 385 by Scotus-Erigena, Abelard, etc. ; and as long practised in the Irish and in the Scottish churches, and formally estab- lished at this day in the Gallican : a Catholicity that regards religion as a national and social agency ; not like the Roman, as a medium of political despotism ; nor like the Teuton, as a sanction to selfish isolation. In fine, these contrasts are confirmed in the subject of the fairies, — in addition to the graduation of their border mixture with the Gothic dwarfs, — by the testimony still more pointed, although negative, of primitive history. The Helden book and Mebelungen, the oldest records of the Teutons — although reaching back no farther than some five or six centuries — make common mention of the dwarfs, and none whatever of the fairies. On the contrary, with the Irish and other Celtic records, they never name the dwarfs before the Teutonic irruptions, while the earliest Irish legends are familiar with the fairies. So true is this indeed, that a son of Milesius himself, who was lost upon the voyage from Iberia to Erin. has been constituted by the bards a sort of chieftain their claim, and the great offspring is apt to "cut" them, more espe- cially if a Celt. That this has been at least the race of this great heresi- arch of the second century, there will now be little doubt, from his cast of mind and doctrine. The latter is described by Migne to be a " philo- sophic system applied to the Christian religion "—un systeme philoso- phique applique a la religion chretienne. It was, in fact, of all the heresies the most intellectual, and much more so than the orthodox Bom an doctrine. It made God a pure intelligence without passion or affection, and conceived the human soul to be essentially so too, its beatitude con- sisting in purgation from the dross of earth. The writer cited remarks, that the attacks of the Fathers upon this the first in date of their trouble- some Celts — y font voir une metaphisique profonde et une graxde fojrce DE KAISONNEMENT. S 386 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. of the Minister fairies, by the title of Donn Fierenach, or Don the truth-teller — a function curiously illustrative of the new view of Macbeth' s witches. The tale is to this day commemorated by a hill in the county of Limerick, which bears that honourable appellation, and roofs the residence of the personage. Again, the dwarf stories published in Germany and Scandinavia turn all, or nearly all, upon money as the moral. The moral of the fairy tales of Ireland is, as invariably, a playful trick, a witty jest, a social lesson or an act of justice. Thus in the former of these races is discerned from the first — in due conformity with the unchangeability of the organism — that subterranean and metallic instinct which marked the merchants of the modern world. Does not the popular Utopia of the Celts — "the realm of feerie" — presage, upon the same principle, its civilizers and organizers I 1 1 This destination makes already the progress in Italy predicted by a note in the fore part of this volume. The Gaul again triumphs in his chivalrous mission. Well done! illustrious nation, true liberator of humanity, in America as in Europe, in Italy as in Greece ; and late as henceforth the protector of the infant peoples of Asia ! The last of the land legs of Feudalism is disabled, and it may be hoped the water one will yield without violence. To bring the English people to some sense of their place and peril, the first requisite was to divest them of that European prestige which made them models of government and champions of liberty ; pretensions which the bustling mediocrities of the Continent served as claqueurs to the feudal oligarchy in confirming. But the juggle of English " libei'ty " and French " despotism '' must have received a death-blow from the crucial case of Italy, and the English themselves begin to see through it at home. They seem already to distinguish the grand organization, which gives the French army its prodigious powers and order. But as they do not reason like a Cuvier or an Owen, it will FAIRIES. 387 be passed on them again, as in the Crimean war, for an exception. They see but little of the still more exquisite net-work of diplomacy which has been drawing for years back around the whole family, and which the Germans froath and flounder in with Hamlet's ribaldry and resolution, marching first upon Paris, then the Ehine, then staying at home. They have for ages been bantering French cookery and French fashions, without a dream that even these implied the organizing intellect ; just as the savage or the child perceives but trifles or playthings in the fossil tooth or bone-joint which to the naturalist speaks a system. But to the sociologic naturalist, the composition of the French army has but the coarseness of texture that makes it sensible to the vulgar, in comparison with the machinery of the political administration. This mechanism will become tangible by example to the English, in its formal application to liberated Italy. For without French organization nothing will have there been done. To leave the Italians to themselves, or give them Anglican parliaments, would be merely changing Gothic force and tyranny for fraud and anarchy. Moreover, France on her own account must keep them under her wing ; the north Italians are mainly Celtic, though of a primitive or lower development, and thus will easily and normally coalesce with the family. Normally, for the old func- tion of the nation is discharged, its successor in the new epoch being Eussia and the Sclavic race. From the same policy of Celtic union, France must also insist on the admission, to the next regulative Congress, of Spain : she is surely as well entitled by resources and population, to say nothing of historic glories, as the equivocal and upstart Prussia. Through her, too, and her possessions, the humanity of Europe could save the wretched South Americans from their own anarchy and the new Northmen. This embodiment would also no doubt bring over England, who is the natural nexus between the Celtic and the Gothic races : her avowed policy, as well as logic, is to treat all things de facto, and so she passed to French from Austrian with the sole battle of Magenta. Thus the Teutons — disgorged of their medieval plunder, and reduced to live, like all honest people, on their own bottom — would subside to their still relatively high and useful place of exploration, action, acquisition — in a word, business. The organizing, the directive, and the decorative functions — all the graces and the grandeurs of civilization — would be left 388 SUPERNATURAL MACHINERY OF SHAKESPEARE. the Celts. These nobler interests are fast sinking beneath the reigning commercialism towards a state more deeply savage than the primitive one of nature ; a state in which the workmen of the he'ad, as of the hand, would be the proletaires and paupers of illiterate cupidity. The ascendant of the race of intellect, and thus of taste, will arrest this, and inaugurate a civilization to which all previous were barbarisms. This social advent is so urgent for the safety of England, and the need of it so incredible, because unflattering, to her people, that the writer is tempted by the residue of space to crown his various demon- strations by a final authority. The great Milton, who was a statesman and philosopher no less than poet, in his History of England, paints his countrymen as follows : — " For Britain (to speak a truth not often spoken), as it is a land fruit- ful enough of men stout and courageous in war, so it is naturally not over fertile of men able to govern justly and prudently in peace, [they] trusting only in their mother-wit ; [men] who consider not justly, tbat civility, prudence, love of the public good, rather than of money or rank, are to this soil in a manner outlandish ; . . . [men], too, impolitic [ignorant of polity] and rude, if not headstrong and intractable to the industry and virtue either of executing or understanding true civil government. Valiant, indeed, and prosperous to win a field; but to know the end and reason of winning, injudicious and unwise: in good oe bad success, alike unteachable. For the sun, which we want, ripens wits as well as fruits ; and as wine and oil are imported to us from abroad, so must ripe understanding, and many civil virtues, be imported into our minds from foreign writings and examples. We shall else mis- carry still, and come short in the attempts of any great enterprise." Here was as inspired a warning as even Milton ever uttered. And assuredly the nation who preconize this genius as having penetrated and portrayed with a fidelity almost divine the denizens of hell and heaven, whom he had never known or seen, will not venture to refuse him at least equal sagacity in judging of a people of whom he was, -with whom he lived, and whom he lectured through all ranks, from the school boy to the monarch. 0CT19S